


Object Lessons: Season 2

by Polly_Lynn



Series: Object Lessons [2]
Category: Castle (TV 2009)
Genre: Angst, Estrangement, F/M, Friends to Lovers, Friendship, Friendship/Love, Jealousy, Partners to Lovers, Romance, Team as Family
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-15
Updated: 2019-12-15
Packaged: 2021-02-25 21:41:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 24
Words: 24,809
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21802339
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Polly_Lynn/pseuds/Polly_Lynn
Summary: I recently started rewatching Castle from the beginning, after taking time off after Dialogic. With Dialogic, I chose a line of dialogue from each episode to prompt the story. For these stories, I chose an object from the episode.Although I suppose in my mind these are "in continuity" with one another, one can certainly read them independent of one another.
Relationships: Kate Beckett & Richard Castle, Kate Beckett/Richard Castle, Kate Beckett/Tom Demming, Richard Castle/Gina Cowell
Series: Object Lessons [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1622947
Comments: 42
Kudos: 22





	1. Precipice—Deep in Death (2 x 01)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There is a lacy, hot pink bra he is not thinking about. This is the paradox that rolls and rattles at the outer rim of his consciousness like a shiny silver roulette ball clattering along a backtrack.

There is a lacy, hot pink bra he is not thinking about. This is the paradox that rolls and rattles at the outer rim of his consciousness like a shiny silver roulette ball clattering along a backtrack.

He’s sitting at his desk. The laptop is open in front of him, but it’s for show. Alexis is asleep, or should be. His mother is who knows where, but they’re both worried about him. He’s given them ample reason to worry over this last stretch of weeks, and either one of them might poke her head in at any moment to check on him, so he has his props at the ready—the laptop, a neglected couple of fingers of scotch within reach, but he’s not interested in either one, anymore than he is interested in the fact that Kate Beckett wears lacy, hot-pink bras beneath her no-nonsense work clothes.

He has been interested in that fact. In the moment, the realization that Kate Beckett’s no-nonsense work clothes can, with the greatest of ease, be transformed into a bit of life-saving gangster’s moll cosplay ushered in a whole new world so forcefully—so _all consumingly—_ that it had very nearly been a short-lived whole new world, indeed.

_Castle. Could you get some back-up, please?_

In the moment, his fingers had itched in more ways than one. He’d felt utterly bereft at the thought of going to his grave not knowing whether or the lacy, hot-pink bra had corresponding lacy, hot pink panties, and if so, what manner of panties. In the moment, he was fairly certain that every last one of his brain cells would be consumed with that lacy, hot pink bra until the end of time. 

But here he is, sitting in the dark, not thinking about it at all.

He is relieved—profoundly so—that there will be a tomorrow with her. He is filled with gratitude, general and specific.

But he’s shaken, too. He’s spent this stretch of weeks assuming she’d come around eventually. He’s spent it rehearsing the conversation she’d denied him. He has honed and polished a hundred versions of the speech he would have given if only she’d have been reasonable and heard him out. He’s spent this time in exile fancying himself some kind of victim in all this, and not even the naked agony on her face—weeks ago and again tonight—could make him understand what he’d done. Her suffering alone couldn’t make him see that no intention, however good, nor any outcome, however dramatic, could justify that breach of trust, that smug conviction that he knew better than she. 

He’s shaken because despite the relief, despite the fact that he is truly grateful, and despite his much-belated epiphany about what, precisely, he did that was so wrong, he’s still struggling with this. He will struggle with it—his smartest-kid-in-the-room tendencies, his burning curiosity as to whether she even _knows_ what he found, the baggage in his own chaotic past that makes him want to bring stability, certainty, safety to those he holds dear.

And he holds her dear.

His heart pounds with that tonight. His hands tremble with it, far too badly for the scotch or the laptop to be anything more than props right now.

He holds dear the electric back-and-forth between the two of them when a case finally gives. He cherishes every iota of respect he’s won from her, even when it’s wrapped up tight in that haughty, sidelong glance she gives him when he’s said something ridiculous with a kernel of something useful in it. He treasures the _fun_ he has with her and how alive it makes him feel, whether it’s working until he’s dead tired, body and soul, or sitting around waiting on all the things they have to wait on. He is humbled by the fact that the work they do together matters in so many ways, and he stands in awe of her courage, her tenacity, and the all-consuming compassion she brings to every interaction with those the victims have left behind.

He values his relationship with her in a way that’s utterly unlike anything else in his life, now or in the past, and he’s shaken to his core to realize how close he’d come to destroying it. He’s shaken to his core to realize that he’s done damage—real damage—to it, even though there’ll be a tomorrow.

His thoughts, every one of them, are consumed by the tremendous loss he’s so narrowly evaded and the struggle—the work—he is in for to hold on tight to what matters. There’s no room for anything else.

There’s a lacy, hot pink bra he’s not thinking about.  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Absence of object? Hmmm.


	2. Restoration—The Double Down (2 x 02)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He’s antsy the morning after they close their swapped murder cases. He shifts constantly in his chair. His sentences trail off. He looks at his phone, then looks around the bullpen, roughly a hundred times a minute.

He’s antsy the morning after they close their swapped murder cases. He shifts constantly in his chair. His sentences trail off. He looks at his phone, then looks around the bullpen, roughly a hundred times a minute.

“What’s your bookmaking operation into today, Castle?” She kicks at his foot seconds before it bangs into her trash can for the millionth time this morning.

“Into?” He turns his full attention toward her in a way that’s just over the top enough to raise her antennae. “My life as a bookie was glamorous, but short-lived, Detective. I am into nothing this morning.” He leans an elbow on the corner of her desk and lowers his to an exaggerated bedroom purr. “Why, Detective? Is there something you’d like me to be into?”

“Castle.” She blows by the innuendo entirely. “You’ve been fidgety—even for you—since the minute you parked yourself in that chair. What is it you’re waiting for?” There’s movement out of the corner of her eye. He tries and fails not to sit up and crane for a look around her. “Or is it who?”

“Whom,” he says with the smirk he knows really pushes the buttons deep in her lizard brain, but she doesn’t give an inch. She folds her hands on her desk blotter and pins him like an unfortunate frog to a dissection tray. It takes him exactly three seconds to cave. “I asked—that is, I had asked around a couple … just a few questions about …”

He finishes the sentence, but the ending is lost in mumble. He shifts in the chair, canting his body slightly away from her.

“A few questions about?” She tips her head toward him and cups a hand behind her ear.

“Property.” His hands grip the arms of the chair and his eyes remain fixed on the floor. “About how the families of victims—how they get back the property …”

“Frank Anderson’s wallet and watch.” She knows instantly that’s what he means. “Jason Cosway took them.”

He nods. “And I was thinking about what you said. About Christina Marx, and how it must feel to think one thing, and then another totally different thing, and then—“

“And then something completely unthinkable.” She’d like to kick herself. Once the case turned completely weird, she’d lost sight of the human details—the inevitable casualties and the barrage of shocks and insults they suffer in the wake of murder. She’d lost sight.

“I don’t know if it means anything. I mean, maybe the watch is just some cheap thing with no sentimental value, or maybe he had pictures in his wallet, or …” He frowns suddenly. “Do we even have them? Do you, I mean—did they even recover them?”

She’s already picking up the phone. There’s been a lot of movement since they’d had Jason Cosway and Eric Marx in for Interrogation Theater, and she hasn’t yet had a chance to track down the outcomes of their warrants for both homes. He sits, tense but quiet—oddly meek almost—as she gets verbal updates and extracts the promise of reports with is dotted and ts crossed.

“They’re in evidence.” She sets the phone back in its cradle.

“Cosway held on to them?” He looks to her for confirmation. “Why? That’s dumb. That’s dumb, right?”

She shrugs. “Maybe he didn’t know where it was safe to dump them, or maybe he thought they were leverage in case Eric Marx stepped out of line.”

“But they’re in evidence.” He slumps back into his chair, his face darkening. “She won’t—Will she ever get them back?”

“It depends on Cosway.” She mulls it over. “If he pleads not guilty, it’ll be a while.”

“Because it’s evidence.” He says it to himself, as if he’s trying to make peace with it and not having much luck. “And if he pleads guilty—if there’s no trial, then how does it work if … if it’s not evidence any more? If it’s just her dad’s things?”

“It’s …” The lump in her throat catches her off guard. She knows what he’s asking. Why he’s asking it. It’s research, and it’s not at all research. Anger masks what she knows is really a flare of grief. She swallows past it all. ”It’s not always easy. There are procedures for the ME, for the cops, for the DA’s office.” She shakes her head. “Families shouldn’t have to ask. After everything, they shouldn’t have to … hunt things down. But things slip through the cracks sometimes.”

He can’t help but flick a glance at the thin gold chain around her neck, any more than she can help the way her fingers flutter upward to make sure of the ring dangling from the end of it.

“Not with you, though,” he says quietly. “Never with you.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: I wanted to write about popcorn. Or ripped-out weave. But absence of objects again. Hmmm.


	3. Graven—Inventing the Girl (2 x 03)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He has some choice words for the clown who first ran his mouth about the picture-to-word exchange rate. In fact, he has about a thousand of them, and yet he can’t help preening about his Cosmo cover. The tall stacks of it are satisfying on the edge of his desk, with their blue-gray spines neatly aligned and his own Mona Lisa smile peering up at him.

He has some choice words for the clown who first ran his mouth about the picture-to-word exchange rate. In fact, he has about a thousand of them, and yet he can’t help preening about his Cosmo cover. The tall stacks of it are satisfying on the edge of his desk, with their blue-gray spines neatly aligned and his own Mona Lisa smile peering up at him.

It’s more than just a feather in a cap that’s already flush with impressive plumage. It’s a new kind of triumph, one that bids fair for Nikki Heat’s fortunes, and though he’d sooner jump out a window than admit it, his nerves are a little frayed about the impending launch, about the fact that people are finally reading the book. His nerves are beyond frayed that she wants to read it.

It’s good. It’s not vanity to own that. It’s certainly a cut above the last few Derrick Storm books, but that’s not necessarily saying a lot. He’d been phoning it in for a while. And in any case, this needs to be better than good. It needs to be exceptional, not just because it’s important, career-wise, for him to swing for the fences with a new character. It needs to be exceptional because she is.

He reaches out and plucks the top-most copy from the stack. His thumb fans along the edge of the pages and stops, unerringly, on the fourth page of the interview—the page with the lone shot of her. It’s … kind of worse than half bad, though he was more politic in his assessment to her. But it’s small and stiffly posed. It’s certainly a pale imitation of the real thing, and it’s weird.

He knows the photographer barely managed to get even this—something that would serve well enough to run in the lower third of a page beneath an overblown pull-quote. God knows the guy complained about it, loud and long, to the eye candy he’d clearly booked with the intention of getting laid. 

The memory of what a tool the guy was makes him squirm a little. He flips back to the beginning of the article with its—frankly atrocious—copy in a variety of fonts that range from mildly overblown to obscenely titanic. He studies the image of himself and the way it pushes right out to the margin of the page.

Now that the glow has worn off a little—now that he’s thinking about Will James and Wyatt Monroe and the apparent general scumbaggery of the profession—he sees this photo is pretty terrible, too. His own hands are on his hips. The eye-candy twins’ hands are in odd places. Not good-odd, just odd-odd, southeast of his sternum and in the neighborhood of his armpit. The whole thing is stagey and awkward, and it annoys him that it takes away from the cover art on the recto. He flips the whole thing closed and tosses the copy on top of the stack that’s a little less satisfying than it was five minutes ago.

He thinks about Jenna McBoyd—the literal images of her and her body, the picture that emerged from them. He thinks about the stalker photos showing a lovely young woman, tension and misery evident in her posture and every line of her face. In the close-ups of bruises from Lanie’s file, the scraped skin on her palms, and the grotesque image of the cut on the inside of her cheek, he sees a person who just wanted to live. He sees the cognitive dissonance of her comp card, sweet here and sultry there—a girl for all seasons.

He pictures his mother, curled into herself on the couch, with her hair up in a fussy scarf as she clutched soft-focus images of her own face in what she believes to have been her prime. He spins his chair a half circle, putting his back to the pile of magazines as he thinks of the stories she must have—infinitely worse back then, or maybe not. Maybe just the same, then and now.

He takes up the top-most copy of the magazine issue again, tentatively this time. He riffles it open, four pages deep in the interview. He blots out the pull-quote with his palm and focuses on her. He sees the photo in a new light. He sees the challenge in the set of her shoulders and the take-no-shit glare. He imagines the hundred ways she must have foiled and frustrated every attempt on the photographer’s part to bend her to his will.

He sets the magazine in the center of his desk. He hems the page in between his elbows. He laughs down at the page and thinks maybe—in just this one case—the nameless clown who ran his mouth about pictures and words might be right. He likes this picture. It’s the best of them—the best one in the whole silly article—and he suddenly envisions it tacked up on the wall. He suddenly envisions her redefining the pin-up girl. 

It’s a ridiculous idea. It’s an absolutely dorky idea, but he’s already holding the magazine down with the heel of one hand. He’s already relishing the jagged sound as he rips the page free. He’s already reaching for the scissors.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: OMG. My Brain and its Trapper Keeper and Puffy Stickers sometimes. Hmmm.


	4. Without Frontiers—Fool Me Once ( 2 x 04)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It’s not exactly a game she’s been playing vis-à-vis the book. It’s just not exactly not a game, and at this point, she’s kind of not sure who’s playing at what.

It’s not exactly a game she’s been playing vis-à-vis the book. It’s just not exactly not a game, and at this point, she’s kind of not sure who’s playing at what.

In the beginning, it was The Principle of the Thing. She _really_ had not liked that _Cosmo_ reporter, and even though it makes sense that she’d have gotten an advanced copy—even though in retrospect it’s completely obvious—the idea of that woman, with her college radio station voice and her _Gee Whiz, Mr. Castle!_ demeanor pawing through Nikki Heat’s pages before she herself had so much as seen the damned thing was an affront.

But it had taken him long enough to figure out that it was an affront that by the time she got the damned thing, she’d been determined to make him pay. Shove the damned thing in the desk drawer nearest his chair so he’d see every time she opened it that she hadn’t even bothered to take it home, let alone read it.

But he’d treated the hand-off like he was giving her the nuclear launch code football, and even though she’d been in the wind-up to deliver a truly epic eye roll, the weight of it hitting her square across the forearms—the literal weight of it—had stopped her cold. She’d looked down to find not the standard hardcover with dust jacket she’d been expecting, but something heavy and oversized with a red _Uncorrected Page Proofs_ banner running diagonally across the front.

They’re his. She knows that. She’d known that from the moment he’d handed them over, though he hadn’t exactly said so. He’d looked a little embarrassed at the creased spine and edge-worn covers and muttered something about Black Pawn thinking he’s not trustworthy. She’d muttered a thank you and they’d marched off in opposite directions. And the game had changed.

She remembers when she was little, her parents had taken her to see a traveling exhibit—Treasures from the British Museum or something like that. She’d been bored and too warm in the crowded halls, and she hadn’t liked the cluttered walls filled with objects to capture the style of an old-school museum before the turn of the twentieth century. But her mom had pulled her through the crush of people into a small, darkened gallery filled with chunks of walls cut from Egyptian temples and pyramids.

Together, she and her mom had crept up close so they could study the hieroglyphs. She remembers—still remembers, most vividly—a section where the the row of symbols had been left incomplete. _Look, Katie._ Her mom had held on to her wrist, and in the air, their two hands had traced a series of intersecting lines. The grid pattern the artist had set down first to guide the careful work of chisel, and later paint. _Just like you do at school._ It had captured her imagination, the idea that this thing of faded beauty was the work of hands just like hers.

She owes herself a truly epic eye roll for it, but having this—a version of the book he did the kind of careful work over—means something to her. It captures her imagination when she sees faint pencil marks in the margins, painstakingly erased before he passed it on to her.

It makes her chuckle to let the pages fall open and tell her which parts gave him the most trouble, and when she feels the faintest trace of glue on a page, she imagines the post-it or the sticky arrow, not so different from the ones that festoon the pages in her files and in and out trays. She wonders what problem he solved and if it was satisfying to peel each challenge cleanly away and toss the remnants of it in the trash.

It slows her down thinking about it all, running her hands hungrily over the surface of each page. For the first few days after he hands it off to her, she only manages four or five pages at a time, sinking back in the bath or tucked up with it on the couch. She studies each one like a four-thousand-year-old chunk of wall looking for the artist’s marks.

But, of course, the game changes again. She gets sloppy with it. She gives into the urge to flip forward to the sex scene she now knows is waiting to ambush her, and he _catches_ her and the only reasonable course of action is fire. She’ll set him on fire, using the damned book as kindling. 

But he’s gone before she can make good. His smug face peering over the divider between the stalls is gone, and now she has to know. She has to arm herself for the next phase of things. That’s how she justifies it—cowering with her feet pulled up in a damned toilet stall. She devours the scene. Her ears burn. Her cheeks and the hollow between her collar bones. She burns, but she reads through it once, twice, three times before she has her breath under control again.

She reads it through once, twice, three times before she can bring herself to keep reading through to the morning after. It’s more agonizing in its own way and she finds herself almost literally reading with one eye cracked open and the other shut tight.

It’s ridiculous. She decides its ridiculous and she slams the covers shut. The violence of the motion shakes something loose from between the pages she hasn’t gotten to yet. It’s a ragged slip of paper—an afterthought of a thing he must have missed as he cleaned up this copy to give to her.

It’s covered in his handwriting, decisive bullet points with page numbers and quick-fire edits. But the back is something else. It’s disconnected words that tumble down the slip, almost in isolation, until the very bottom. It’s there he arrived at something—some kind of answer, however unsatisfactory, to whatever challenge this was.

 _Dawn,_ she reads. It’s not scratched out, but there staccato pencil-point dots. _Hesitation marks,_ she thinks to herself. _Pre-dawn searchlight._ He seems to have been happier with that. But where it falls—where his thoughts pool at the bottom of this forgotten scrap of paper—is on something later.

 _Too soft._ The pencil is heavy there. It’s almost scratched into the page. _Nikki isn’t there yet. Just him. He’s been there since the moment he first saw her._

She reads it again. And again. And the game changes. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: This is clunky AF. Hmm.


	5. Lamellae—When the Bough Breaks (2 x 05)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He doesn’t have a plan the morning after the book party. He sulkily wonders why he even needs a plan. He shows up. For weeks, he’s been showing up, even when no one’s called him about a body dropping, and she has welcomed it. Okay. Maybe welcomed is a bit strong, but she’s tolerated it, and the shit she gives him sometimes—the shit he gives right back—is just part of their dynamic. He doesn’t need a plan, he doesn’t need a reason, he doesn’t need an excuse for just showing up. 

He doesn’t have a plan the morning after the book party. He sulkily wonders why he even _needs_ a plan. He shows up. For weeks, he’s been showing up, even when no one’s called him about a body dropping, and she has welcomed it. Okay. Maybe welcomed is a bit strong, but she’s tolerated it, and the shit she gives him sometimes—the shit he gives right back—is just part of their dynamic. He doesn’t need a plan, he doesn’t need a reason, he doesn’t need an excuse for just showing up. 

But he drops his sunglasses on the corner of her desk anyway.

It’s what he does, first thing. It just feels … prudent to have some justification for his presence, however flimsy it may be. And given his _CSI: Miami_ moment as he slid them on and reminded everyone that the party would be open bar, it’s pretty much the flimsiest. But it’s something, and he might need something.

It’s just that he doesn’t know which version of her he’ll run into this morning. And he came here to run into her. That’s the totality of his plan: Run into some version of Beckett.

He studies the geography of her desk, unhappily. Unhappy is pretty much the word of the day, so maybe he should just go. Maybe running into her is the worst plan possible, but he doesn’t go. He tries to determine whether there’s some more ideal, slightly out of the way nook where he might tuck the sunglasses out of the way to better sell the lie if he needs it.

His gaze falls on the row of matryoshka dolls, un-nested and arranged in a neat line that ends with the biggest doll snugging right up to her name plate. He can’t remember if she did that or he did. He’d un-nested them and she’d re-nested, and so it had gone, back and forth with a reversal or three thrown in, while they bickered over the details of the case. Nested or un-nested by his hands or hers, the metaphor is far too on the nose for his tastes, but it’s apt—she is a Kate inside a Beckett inside a Beckett inside a Beckett, and so on into seeming infinity. 

He reaches out to touch the smallest of the figurines. He remembers the weight of her in his hand, surprisingly heavy compared with her hollow big sisters. It seems absurd that it was just yesterday that they were strolling side by side in the brisk October sunshine, with him annoying her in all the usual ways, but making her laugh, too, as he accumulated more and more shopping bags with each stop they made.

A lot of things about them seem absurd. He is primed to leave for good, to stop stopping by and turn his attention to a character he stands in awe of. He’s primed to make a boatload of money in the process. She is beyond eager to be rid of him as she took particular pleasure in telling him last night. So it’s an Everybody’s Happy scenario, but standing there, contemplating the tiniest, heaviest, most mysterious, innermost figure in a series, he’s far from happy.

She’s far from happy, too. Her voice sounds out from behind him, and he jumps, even though this was the idea—he came here to run into her, but it’s immediately frustrating. She’s bristling as though they’ve only just turned their backs on one another. She’s brought her own coffee, a pointed statement that she was most definitely not planning to run into him.

It’s frustrating, because she’s not happy that he’s here, but he knows—he _knows_ —she wouldn’t be any happier if he hadn’t been here when she showed up with her nonsense coffee from a place she doesn’t even like. He knows she was unhappy at the idea of another Nikki Heat book, and now she’s unhappy there won’t be one, whatever she’s said to the contrary. She was unhappy at he idea of being stuck with him for the foreseeable future, and now she’s unhappy that he’s going. 

He knows exactly how she feels.

He lifts his chin and squares his shoulders as she confronts him at the desk. He produces his stupid sunglasses with a flourish, even as she’s scoffing and calling him on the lamest excuse ever. The move infuriates her and the poor little dolls get caught in the cross-fire. She tells him not to forget them and walks away. He’s primed to leave, but she just has to beat him to the punch.

He picks up the littlest doll. He feels her weight and solidity. He studies her inscrutable smile and knows that it shouldn’t be like this—a Kate inside a Beckett inside a Beckett inside a Beckett and a Rick inside a Castle inside a Castle inside a Castle—but what can he do?

He’s primed to leave for good, and there’s nothing she wants more.

He sets the littlest doll inside the next littlest and hides her away inside the hollow, smiling figure. It’s an Everybody’s Happy scenario and an on-the-nose, maddeningly apt metaphor. He feels the littlest doll rattle inside her big sister as he places the two of them together into the next littlest and that’s exactly how this is.

Everybody’s Happy, except deep down. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Hurry for the most obvious metaphor in the world! Hmmm.


	6. Generation—Vampire Weekend (2 x 06)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She should not have feelings this strong about an egg. Honestly, she should not have any feelings, strong or otherwise, about an egg. But the Saga of Feggin is a rollercoaster ride. And she has strong feelings. 

She should not have feelings this strong about an egg. Honestly, she should not have _any_ feelings, strong or otherwise, about an egg. But the Saga of Feggin is a rollercoaster ride. And she has strong feelings. **  
**

He tells her about it. He drops into the chair by the desk, bemoaning the fact that he’s suddenly, unexpectedly, pedagogically a grandfather. She thinks about the project she did a million years ago. She stupidly opens her mouth. He leaps on the information, of course. He wants to know what she named it, if it was a boy or a girl, if she painted the face on it herself.

“Was it emo, Beckett?” He leans forward with his chin on his fist. “Were you a teen mom of an emo egg baby?” 

She wads up a piece of scratch paper and lobs it at his forehead. She tells him to shut up, mostly because she can’t even remember the name of the boy she was stuck with—the boy who did absolutely nothing and got the same credit she did—and she feels _old._ He picks up on it. He diverts the conversation to his own memories and comes up empty. 

“Must have spent the egg-baby years at boarding school.” He makes an exaggerated face. “Teaching a whole class of boys about being parents? Crazy, right?” 

“Crazy,” she agrees, giving him the glare she knows he was after. 

Feggin makes an appearance then, and she thinks it’s cute. She pretends she doesn’t. She pretends the whole thing is ridiculous, but she has a soft spot for this side of him—the goofy dad who would do literally anything for his kid. She gets all warm and fuzzy over the eye-roll-inducingly proud dad, who is not satisfied with extolling his real kid’s virtues non-stop, he insists on spinning an endless yarn about Feggin’s achievements. 

“He was sitting up all by himself at less than a day old,” he tells her—in a stage whisper, because Feggin has finally gone down for a nap. “Do you know how hard it is for an e-g-g to sit up at all?” 

Her pen drops dramatically to the pile of Crow’s drawings spread out in front of her on the work table. The two of them go round and round about whether Feggin knows he’s adopted, whether he knows he’s an egg, whether he’s so precocious that he can spell. She pretends to rub at the headache his nonsense has raised behind her eyes, but they both know she’s hiding a smile. They both know that Feggin brings out that warm, fuzzy feeling she gets when she sees this side of him. 

And then she is terrified when suddenly Feggin’s health and well-being are _her_ responsibility. That is … especially ridiculous, and she tells herself that due diligence is stuffing him away in a drawer for safe keeping. She tells herself that her shaking hands and pounding heart and the sudden, sick feeling in the pit of her stomach are about Alexis—they’re about empathy for him and relief that he and his daughter have relationship that means she takes the _Call—No Questions Asked_ mandate seriously, and so does he. 

But she doesn’t shove Feggin in a drawer. She finds a mostly-empty roll of packing tape and makes a nest inside the cardboard center with carefully crumpled-up tissues. She whispers an apology for leaving him on her desk while she interviews the Freemans again, and as her end of the bullpen gets empty, emptier, she mutters to him about Rosie and how terrible it is, at such a critical age, to lose the big brother she obviously worshipped. 

She works late into the night, and when her eyes are bleary and she absolutely _can’t_ any more, she looks down at the egg. 

“I gotta go home, kid.” She rolls open the drawer and tries to look tough, but the cheeky smile undoes her. She curses to herself nonstop as she rearranges the bottom of her bag into some kind of stable foundation and offloads any egg-endangering items into the drawer instead. 

She scowls at the stupid thing on the subway and spends an uneasy night, waking at irregular intervals to check that the little nest is undisturbed on the nightstand beside her. 

“Not a word,” she tells Feggin sternly in the morning. “Not. A. Word.” 

She’s ridiculously gratified that he’s ridiculously gratified that his grandegg was in good hands. She can’t help the genuine smile that turns up the corners of her mouth when she sees that he’s weary and worried about Alexis and her friend and the party, even though he’s proud at how she handled it. She can’t help being stupidly glad that Feggin in his nest is something—however stupid—she could do for him.

Ultimately, she mourns the shocking murder of Feggin. They mourn it together, even though she’s still kind of mad at him about the stupid story he punked her with. The party dwindles to mostly their little precinct family. They lean on opposite counters in the kitchen and she offers to throw the book at Paige. 

“Try her as an adult?” He looks bloodthirsty even though his mustache is curling away from his lip and the wig sits at an odd angle because he keeps scratching at the hairline. His gaze tracks toward the stairs Alexis had ascended—sadly, slowly, at far too early an hour—and the hardness fades. “Is that ethical?” 

“Ethical? She murdered Feggin!” 

She says it far too loudly—far too vehemently. She should not feel this strongly about an egg. His grin is conspiratorial. He shouldn’t feel this strongly, except of course he should, and he’s glad to have a partner in indignation. He’s a little too glad, and the skin rising out of the neck of her shirt burns. Her cheeks burn and her hands tingle. 

“So we can count on you for a victim impact statement?” He pulls the curling mustache off entirely and fiddles with it. He’s teasing her, but there’s color in his cheeks, too. He’s glad, but this is all a little agonizing.

“Oh, you can count on me.” She’s trying to make a joke of it, but there’s too much sincerity. There’s too much. She turns to the counter and starts gathering up cast-off plates and napkins. She makes herself briskly, pointedly useful, but the soft words come as she brushes by him. “Feggin can count on me.” 

She should not have feelings this strong about an egg. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: GLURGE. And yet. Why won’t these two stupid bebes just kiss in this episode? Hmmm. 


	7. Compilation—Famous Last Words (2 x07)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He doesn’t love the first manufactured moment between Nikki and Rook in Heat Wave. It was a cranky response to a persistent note from his editor, from Cannell and Connelly both, from Alexis that Nikki didn’t seem to like Rook much. So he’d written it into the first damned chapter: A direct-from-factory accidental personal space invasion complete with unexpected sparks.

He doesn’t love the first manufactured moment between Nikki and Rook in _Heat Wave._ It was a cranky response to a persistent note from his editor, from Cannell and Connelly both, from Alexis that Nikki didn’t seem to like Rook much. So he’d written it into the first damned chapter: A direct-from-factory accidental personal space invasion complete with unexpected sparks.

He doesn’t love it for the cliché factor, and hanging a lantern on it by having Nikki comment how cliché it is did not increase his love for it one little bit. But he also doesn’t love it because she does too like him. She just _shows_ that she likes him by pretending to not like him very much, and what kind of fool can’t see that?

Except, ok, none of the above save possibly Connelly from time to time falls under the heading of any kind of fool. So maybe if he’d spent less time sulking and more time actually addressing the damned note, he wouldn’t have to live with the eye sore of a cliché in Chapter 1.

But the other thing about it—the other way the damned thing dogs him—is the sudden onset of life imitating art. He honestly can’t tell if he’s imagining it. And if he’s not, if it’s new. And if it’s new, what’s actually going on. 

It’s not like they’ve shied away from very not-accidental personal space invasion from the start. Hell, she’d handcuffed him—twice—within twenty-four hours of meeting him, and whatever Little Miss You Have No Idea claims to the contrary, that was at least partially recreational for both of them. For his part, he’s done the casual lean in, listen in. He’s lured her into the close confines of an elevator and gloated about it, and he’s maneuvered her into evening wear and his arms on a dance floor.

Those kinds of moves have all been … legible to him. It’s how they show they like each other by pretending not to like each other. But lately there’s been something else. There’s been her reading over his shoulder and him reading over hers. There’s been the sudden—tragically outside-his-head-voice—realization that she smells like cherries, and just today, just now, they’ve lived through the iPod incident.

He needed her to hear it. Right away and just like that: Earbuds and the track he’d hastily edited together into his lyrical circumstantial case. For once, it was urgent, not some not-accidental move on his part or hers. But all the same, there it was just seconds later. In the midst of everything awful—just so awful—a moment with the world falling away, but for the two of them. There it was: Unexpected sparks and the worst kind of cliché,

It’s on his mind now—music and her and an elegy for the mix tape, because that’s exactly what his brain put a pin in right then and there. Had she ever made a mix tape? Had anyone ever made one for her? Is she—oh, God—is she too _young_ for mix tapes?

It’s on his mind, so he does the math, and he doesn’t think so. He thinks she probably must know a little bit about hovering, muscles tensed, over a boom box waiting to hit _Play_ and _Record_ simultaneously the absolute instant the radio DJ fades the song up. And she must have used the eraser end of a pencil to rewind her fair share of cassettes.

But even if she hasn’t, surely the concept can’t be lost on her. Even if it was CDs for her and tapes for him, she has to know that peculiar pleasure, doesn’t she? He wants to know and he’s afraid to ask and who even _is_ he lately?

Afraid to ask is for other people. That’s what he tells himself, day after day, when he strides in and plops down in his chair. He tells himself that today’s the day he’ll come out with it: _Best mix tape you ever got. Contents and your personal rankings. And bear in mind, Detective, there will be follow-up questions for embarrassing inclusions and misguided rankings. Go!_

He rehearses it. He repeats it _sotto voce_ in the elevator between the lobby and the fourth floor. He tries to psych himself up from the passenger’s seat, but day after day, he doesn’t come out with it. He doesn’t challenge or inquire or so much as hint. He … fantasizes.

He writes playlists in the back of his mind. They’re beautifully balanced things. There’s sexy R & B followed by annoying ear worms. From there, he launches into straight up windows-down, classic rock, then sing-along power pop, with old-school punk hot on its heels. He plans interstitials like he used to do when he was at the top of his mix-tape game—dialogue from movies and TV shows and two-second snippets from lesser songs that didn’t deserve a full slot on the roster.

He doesn’t come out with it, because he’s afraid she’ll laugh. He’s afraid she’ll roll her eyes at the very idea of the mix tape as a dying art form. He’s afraid she’ll tell him he’s such a cliché.

He doesn’t come out with it because he wants the possibility—the eternal possibility—of a mix tape he’ll make for her. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: This, my friends, is nonsense. Way too early for this. But the mix tape idea would not shut up. Hmmm.


	8. Negative Space—Kill the Messenger (2 x 08)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He’s making paperclip shapes on the edge of her desk. She watches from the edge of the bullpen, curious, as he roots around in the plastic tray near the lamp for the few colored ones she’s inherited from the kind of people who care about cute, color-coordinated office supplies. He sets those aside in a pile, then dives back in. She inches closer and sees that he seems to be going for size now. He’s sorting out the smooth, standard clips from the slightly bigger ones that have some texture to them.

He’s making paperclip shapes on the edge of her desk. She watches from the edge of the bullpen, curious, as he roots around in the plastic tray near the lamp for the few colored ones she’s inherited from the kind of people who care about cute, color-coordinated office supplies. He sets those aside in a pile, then dives back in. She inches closer and sees that he seems to be going for size now. He’s sorting out the smooth, standard clips from the slightly bigger ones that have some texture to them.

She approaches closer still, but he doesn’t notice. He’s lost in thought, bent low over the surface as he lays out the borders for three shapes that are not quite squares, one tightly fenced area in bright colors, one a little taller than it is wide made from the smaller, everyday version, and one solid, broad-shouldered thing in the larger ones. He has a spare one of those, and he runs a thumb nail along the ridges.

“What are you doing now, Castle?” She says abruptly with intent to startle. She drops a short stack of files from a bit of a height on to the desk for dramatic effect, but he’s unfazed. He’s disappointingly _un-_ startled.

“Thinking about absence,” he says as he breathes into each square, close enough to fog the scarred laminate desktop within for a brief second. “What’s not there.”

“Deep.” She drops into her chair and leans back, waiting for him to notice she’s glaring. “And you had to rifle through my stuff to come up your zen koan for the day?”

“I didn’t _have_ to rifle through your stuff. I just _like_ to rifle through your stuff.” He flicks a flirtatious smile up at her, but his impromptu art instillation pulls his attention immediately back. “Olivia. Caleb. Brady.” He taps a fingertip beneath each shape as he says the name. “It’s weird, right?” He gestures across all three and she sees empty picture frames. She sees absence. “How much this case is about what’s _not_ there?”

“Not really weird, no.” She shakes her head, wondering if she really means it. “Homicide always starts with what’s not there. Who’s not there.” She walks her fingers in reverse order along the row he’s laid out. She repeats the names with emphasis. “Brady. Caleb. Olivia.”

“Absence,” he says with a grim nod. “I know. But think about it: We never found the missing package. Do we even know—“ He stops himself. His and hovers over the Caleb square, then the Brady square and back again. “Do we have _any_ idea what ‘insurance’ Brady Thompson would have sent Montgomery?”

“None,” she admits after a moment’s contemplation. She shrugs. “But we didn’t need it.”

“Right. Because the package we didn’t find led us to the money that was there, then wasn’t there.”

He gives her a look that says he knows she’s already halfway on his train of thought. She rolls her eyes and climbs aboard.

“And the missing money was all about the missing body.” She pauses. They share a pained look at that particularly terrible absence. They still don’t know what Frank Davis did with Olivia’s body. They still have no answers for her Aunt Sara. She feels the weight of that settle over both of them and tries, in an odd reversal of their usual dynamic, to part the clouds. She gestures toward the paperclip frames with her chin. “So it’s Maltese Falcons all the way down?”

“More like Holy Grails of the Monty Python variety,” he says with the first genuine grin she’s seen since she sat down. “Not sure this case has the classic MacGuffin street cred of the Maltese Falcon.”

“I don’t know.” She’s warmed to the idea now. She’s warmed to the idea of coaxing him out of the strange funk he seems to be in. “There’s Lenanne Wellesley’s missing ring, too.”   
“Oooh.” He sits up. “Yeah. That gun was not the mantel the first time we saw her!”

“Now you’re mixing your literary metaphors.” She picks up one of the spare paperclips and lobs it at him. “What’s with you and this case?”

He snatches the projectile out of the air. He fiddles with it, slipping the tip of one pinky through the widest end plucking at it. He’s quiet for a long time, save for the faint _twang_ of the metal. A long time for him, anyway. He ultimately taps the clip near the brightly colored “Olivia” square.

“Absence of family, I guess.” He shrugs and hooks a purple clip with the end of the other in his hand, breaking the frame. “Olivia loses her mother—”

“And goes looking for her father,” she finishes.

She thinks about Blake Wellesley and his startling anger—his startling apparent sorrow—over the daughter he would never know. She’s skeptical by nature. More than that, she’s cynical by habit, and she has her doubts about whether he’d feel at all the same about real, live love child. But some glimmer of … something suspends her disbelief. Understanding, maybe, about what this fixation on absence is about for him.

“She goes looking for her father,” he says at last. “Without that, none of this happens.”

He says it like it’s punctuation. _THE END_ in small caps on a black and white title card, even though she thinks he might not really mean it to be. He nods, not quite looking at her as he sweeps the paperclips into his cupped palm in a sudden motion.

“Absence,” she says, feeling a little miserable. There are things she’d like to ask, but she can’t quite see how in the confines of the way they are with each other. They have their rules of engagement, and she doesn’t see a clear path to it. “You’re right, Castle. It’s all about what’s not there.”

“Toldja.” He deliberately leans too close to dump the paperclips. She wards him off with an exaggerated gesture and a scowl. “Didn’t I?” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Blegh. Do not like. Hmmm.


	9. Paper Chase—Love Me Dead (2 x 09)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It starts, as so many things in his life do these days, as a game to annoy her. He lives to spice up the murder board, and she lives to catch him in the act. And with this case? The game is definitely on.

It starts, as so many things in his life do these days, as a game to annoy her. He lives to spice up the murder board, and she lives to catch him in the act. And with this case? The game is definitely on.

He bribes Ryan with a dollar for the vending machine because he needs access to a computer. Then he bribes Esposito with a dollar for the vending machine because it won’t do to have Big Brother hanging around or running off to tattle on him to Beckett. It’s essential that he have some time to use the computer in peace. This is _their_ game, and the boys aren’t invited.

He does a quick and dirty image search, clicking away and checking over each shoulder with the regularity of man on the run. She does have mutant sneaking-up powers after all, and even though she’ll be plenty annoyed if she catches him here and now—especially if she finds out that, one, he bribed Ryan and Esposito, and two, Ryan and Esposito can be bought very cheaply indeed—he stands to gain maximum annoyance points, as well as no small amount of personal satisfaction, if he can get these all the way over the goal line.

He finds the two images he’s after, or at least some raw material that will do for a start. He has to settle, frankly, because she won’t be gone forever and it looks like Ryan and Esposito didn’t spend as much time bickering at the vending machine as he’d hoped they would. He hits print. He trashes the images and clears the browser cache. He erases his trail as best he can, then saunters away from Ryan’s desk like he was never there.

He nods at the boys. They’re arguing over who got the better snack and they hardly notice, so he takes the bold step of palming the bottle of White Out off Beckett’s desk on his way past. He’s got grand plans for his project, and he’d love to grab her scissors and scotch tape, too, but it’s too risky. It’s fifty-fifty that she’ll notice the missing White Out immediately if she’s back before he is, and if she does there’ll be a contract put on his life, so he settles for the booty he has in hand and makes his meandering way toward the printer farthest away from their little oasis of desks.

He charms Velasquez out of her scissors and tape, and once he has his printouts and a few spare sheets of paper in hand, he ducks into one of the short, shadow-y hallways that end in a window that would have led out on to an old school fire escape back in the day. He studies the first of his images with a critical eye. It’s not perfect, but he’s burning daylight. He decides it will have to do.

He leans his butt against the low window sill and sets to work on the second. That’s the one that needs most of his attention. He carefully paints out the eyes and mouth on the first image with delicate strokes of the White Out brush. When he’s finished, he cuts the whole thing out with tiny, precise snips to preserve as much as he can, then tapes the resulting shape to a fresh piece of eight-and-a-half by eleven.

With the penultimate pieces of his plan in hand, he peers around the corner with all the stealth of a Pink Panther villain. She’s nowhere in sight, so he just might have time to for the copier. He just might have time to ratchet things up to peak annoyance and still get his handiwork pinned up on the board before she gets back from wherever she got to after their interview with a tearful Scarlett Price.

He’s ultracasual at the copier. Velasquez makes her way over to reclaim her property. And, of course, to peek.

Her mouth falls open when she sees. “She’s gonna kill you, you know.”

“You think?” He gives her a conspiratorial grin and a cheerful wave as she walks off, quite possibly to place her bet on him not living to see midnight.

It takes him some fiddling with the grayscale button to get things just right. He then dithers, wishing he could burn his castoffs to absolutely prevent discovery. He thinks about finding a shredder, but his Beckett sense is tingling. He hastily folds the unusables and shoves them into his various pockets. He races for the murder board and stops short in front of it. She’s added headers at the top already. She’s around.

_Shit._

She’s _around._

He turns a full circle and can’t see her anywhere. The two blank white expanses call out to him. He has to make a decision. He panics and fumbles for one of the spare magnet clips. He secures the first image his hand provides—the one he poured his artistic talents into in the hallway and at the copier. He slaps it up beneath her hasty purple letters— _MASKED MAN._

He makes a blind reach for a second magnet clip. His hands are clumsy with nerves. He fumbles, and it drops to the floor with a clang. He stoops and comes up with it. He whirls as he stands, hand outstretched. He comes within who knows how few millimeters of clocking her right across the jaw, but her lightning reflexes save the day.

For her at least.

Her fingers close around his wrist. He wonders how many times in the last eight months he’s had bruises that match her vise-like grip exactly.

“No.” She snatches the sheet of paper with her free hand and crumples it into a tight ball. “No TV pimps."

“How do you know it’s a pimp?!” he whines. “You didn’t even _look.”_

“Huggy Bear.” She holds the ball up to her forehead like a street corner mind reader. “Purple suit. Fur coat. Fedora.”

“Wrong!” He shakes off her hold. “One, it’s not a fedora, it’s a trilby. Two—” He risks a dramatic pause. He steels himself against the force of her glare. “Two, Huggy Bear is not, canonically, a pimp.”

She goes absolutely still and silent. Her eyes close and he can tell she is thinking of the most creative ways to murder him in a room full of cops. It’s glorious. He can practically hear the annoyance points racking up for a good long moment before she hurls the wadded up paper into the garbage can by her desk without looking.

She’s on the move then. She slams open her desk drawer for a blank sheet of paper and produces a fat-tipped marker from somewhere in the back. The marker squeaks with extreme prejudice as she draws a huge, perfect question mark Edward Nygma would be proud of. She whirls back toward the board, but he puts his body between her and the next target of her wrath.

“Detective,” he says in absolutely calm tones precisely calibrated to restart her murder motor. “I can see that you _can’t_ see a place for a vibrant character from America’s history on our murder board.” Her face darkens and he falters. He may actually have gone too far this time, so he rushes on. “But what can you _possibly_ have against our Masked Man?”

She has an answer. She has _so many_ answers, but the Captain exits his office on a beeline for the board. She narrows her eyes and snatches up her question mark. She slaps it just beneath the hasty purple letters— _DANTON._ She singes him with one final glare. The Captain arrives. The Masked Man stays in his rightful place.

He smiles to himself as the annoyance positively radiates from her.

_Victory.  
_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: 1300 very stupid words. Hmmm.


	10. Lark in the Morning—One Man's Treasure (2 x 10)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The long nights don’t really get to him. It’s something that’s low-key bugged her since the beginning. He is more or less chipper, twenty-four seven, and it’s not likely that he came by this particular superpower honestly. It’s not like he went from the demands of the academy to the deep end of the shift-work pool immediately thereafter. Any resilience in the face of sleep deprivation on his part surely comes from bad behavior, and how is that fair?

The long nights don’t really get to him. It’s something that’s low-key bugged her since the beginning. He is more or less chipper, twenty-four seven, and it’s not likely that he came by this particular superpower honestly. It’s not like he went from the demands of the academy to the deep end of the shift-work pool immediately thereafter. Any resilience in the face of sleep deprivation on his part surely comes from bad behavior, and how is that fair?

But the fact remains, the hours just don’t get to him. He’s an early bird and a night owl and although he often pretends like he needs late-afternoon pick-me-ups, she knows an excuse to save his own life and lives of others by ensuring that she’s getting strategic doses of caffeine throughout the day.

She wonders if this is the exception, though. It might be that a late-night summons to a dumpster, some quality time spent surrounded by eye-high piles of trash, and the physical strain of … whatever that was he was doing to protect his _very acute sense of smell_ might have actually done him in, because he is definitely not attuned to her coffee levels this morning.

It’s not like she cares. It’s not like she’s been casting significant glances at the tragically empty mug in the middle of her blotter and increasingly lethal glares at him shortly thereafter. And it’s certainly not that she depends on him to play Coffee Boy. She’s a big girl and perfectly capable of knowing damned well when she needs a jolt and when she’s fine without one. But if he’s not paying attention to the case—and he’s not—and he’s not making himself useful—which he’s definitely not—then why is he even hanging around?

“Will you have coffee with me?”

He blurts outs his question at the exact moment her mouth opens to blurt out her own. They sit, wide-eyed and staring at each other for a long, exceptionally weird moment. He recovers first, because nothing in this life his fair.

“The break room.” He shakes his head. “I’m gonna make myself one of those fancy coffees you pretend you hate. Care to join me?”

She looks at her computer screen. No urgent update on any of the five things she’s waiting on has popped up in her email. Her phone is silent, and there’s absolutely no reason not to take ten damned minutes to beat back the constant lightning strikes behind her eyes with one of his perfectly pulled thirty-second shots. There’s no reason, except that was just kind of weird. He’s been kind of weird since they got to the precinct.

Weird takes a back seat to caffeine headache, though. She nods and trails after him, perching nearby to watch as he tamps the fine grounds into a firm puck and to get the earliest whiff possible of the life-saving brew. She drums her fingertips on the metal edge of the table as he foams the milk and gently deposits a layer atop the flat, perfect black of the espresso.

He turns with care, a cup in each hand and doesn’t quite offer her one. She scowls and opens her mouth to snap at him for toying with her, but his expression pulls her up short. He’s not toying with her.   
“I just want make sure that you’re really okay with having her here,” he says, very nearly looking at the floor as he finally hands over the cup.

“I wouldn’t have said yes if I wasn’t.” She sips at the coffee, half hiding her puzzled expression behind the rim. 

He mumbles something about _Busy_ and _In the way,_ and she laughs outright.

“Big Castle’s the one who likes to get in the way,” she says over her shoulder.

She heads for the door, for her desk, but he lags behind. He stays put in the middle of the break room looking like a big, lost kid with a tiny coffee cup in his hand. 

“She likes you,” he says in a rush. He’s talking to the foam now, and she doesn’t quite know what to make of it. “She looks up to you.”

“I like her.” She takes a step back into the room. He’s unexpectedly serious about this. It’s not a look she’s used to on him. “She’s a great kid.”

“She …” He takes a too-quick sip of coffee that’s stage business at first, then buys him some real time as it scalds his tongue.“She’s never really had anyone—a woman,” he grimaces as he corrects himself, “to talk to about …”

He’s flailing. She takes pity on him. “Girl stuff?” 

“Woman stuff,” he says ruefully. “Careers and studying abroad and“—he casts about for something to round out his trio—”when to use lethal force on horny teenage boys, and whatever.”

“Yeah.” She laughs into her own coffee, but it’s a little sad. It’s a little curious when Alexis has a mother, has had a stepmother, has had who knows how many of the women he steps out with zipping in and out of her life, and still she sees that it’s true— _she’s never really had_ … It occurs to her that late nights solo-parenting might explain some of his twenty-four, seven superpower. It occurs to her that he might have come by it honestly, after all. “She’s not gonna get good guidance from you on any of those, is she?”

“Well, maybe that last one.” A grin curls up to breach the curve of his cup.

“ _Yes,_ is not good guidance on _When to use lethal force with horny teenage boys,_ Castle.” She kicks at his shoe, taking care not to send coffee slopping. She turns back toward the door, gesturing toward the bullpen with a nod of her head.

“Are you sure about that?” He falls into step beside her. “You might need to show your work there, Detective.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: This breaks my own rules—I don’t particularly like to AU things, even in minor ways, but this conversation apparently wanted to happen. Over coffee. Hmmm.


	11. Damage Control—The Fifth Bullet (5 x 11)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It happens in slow motion, the way nightmares do. He diverts from the elevator straight to the break room, because he knows that if she made it home at all last night, it can’t have been for long. He’s preoccupied with their amnesiac, with their murder victim’s wife and the O. Henry–level irony of her souped-up D-cups, and it happens in slow motion.

It happens in slow motion, the way nightmares do. He diverts from the elevator straight to the break room, because he knows that if she made it home at all last night, it can’t have been for long. He’s preoccupied with their amnesiac, with their murder victim’s wife and the O. Henry–level irony of her souped-up _D_ -cups, and it happens in slow motion.

His first thought is that she’s wearing a white shirt. His second thought is that she almost never wears white, so of course the universe would be aligned against him this morning. His third thought is that she’s wearing a white shirt that is now positively soaking wet, and whatever size her cups are, there is definitely no souping-up necessary. This is also his fourth thought and his fifth thought and every thought stretching out into infinity until he realizes that she is going to kill him.

“I brought you coffee,” he says. He’d really like to congratulate himself on the fact that neither _cup_ nor _soup_ is among the words that race headlong out of his mouth, but—one, they are really very stupid words, and two, it wouldn’t matter if he was currently outdoing Lincoln’s Second Inaugural for eloquence, because she is going to _kill_ him.

Just not right away, apparently. 

“Thank you, Castle,” she says through her teeth, and then she’s … gone.

He stands there like an idiot with the two cups, and in some kind of _Matrix_ -like blink, she’s all the way across the bullpen, headed for the locker room. He sets the cups down on her desk, then thinks better of leaving the incriminating evidence right there. He dashes in the opposite direction to dump them in the break room sink, then rushes back across the bullpen He takes the corner on to the hall that leads to the locker room at speed.

And runs straight into her again. Literally, full contact, straight into her again.

“Sorry!” His hands shoot out to steady her shoulders, then flinch immediately back as his mind fills up with not very helpful images of formerly white shirts and thoughts of his imminent death. “Beckett, I am so sorry.”

He’s saying it to her brown leather back. She’s gone again, and he wonders for a fleeting moment if this is all an anxiety dream. He’s not sure how else to explain her sudden ability to teleport, but just in case he trots after. He catches her outside the interview room and manages to skid to a halt in front of her, on the very threshold.

“I’ll pay for your dry cleaning,” he says in a voice as low and earnest as he can make it. She says nothing. “I’ll take it to the dry cleaners. All of it.”

He swallows heard, taking in the loose brown turtleneck she has layered under her jacket. He suddenly realizes what _all of it_ must entail, because she was soaked to the skin, and there was more than just that white shirt between the outside world and her skin. There were … cups, and t _his is not helping._

“I will take everything you own to the dry cleaners.”

She doesn’t answer his desperate blurt. She doesn’t acknowledge it. She moves his entire body with the tip of one index finger and steps past him into the room.

She maintains laser focus on the case after that. It’s not that she’s not talking to him, she’s just not talking to him about anything other than work. 

That’s how it goes through the whole mini-lecture from Doc Holloway and the different facets of memory, and their Amnesiac of Interest’s new christening as _Jay._ It’s how things go when Esposito gives them the low-down on Rocco and forgery and some attaché pain in the ass they may never be able to touch. It’s how things go all damned day, even though he keeps snatching moments to offer everything he can think of.

“Laundry?” He tries to step into her line of sight as she exits the Ladies’ Room. “It’s not dry clean. It’s hand wash. I’ll do it. Hand wash, line dry, expert pressing.”

She doesn’t even spare him a glance.

“A replacement!” He offers as she jots details on the murder board. “It’s probably a total loss. I’ll replace it, of course.”

She looks right past him, that time, calling something pointless out to Esposito, just in case he’s not sure she’s ignoring him.

“My credit card,” he says from the hall outside the break room. She’s pouring herself coffee, and given the day he’s had, he’s maintaining minimum safe distance. “I give you my credit card, you get … whatever. I won’t even look at the statements!”

She arches an eyebrow at him and leaves via the other break room door.

By the end of the day he’s kind of had it. He’s gone from bracing for painful death to wanting to strangle her. It was an accident. He was trying to do something nice in the first place, and now he’s trying to make amends, and at this point it’s just _mean_ not to let him.

He hunts her down to tell her so. He marches past interrogation and through he bullpen. She’s back in the break room, though. She’s standing by as Jay and Ryan make up the couch with blankets.

He hears her tell Jay _I won’t give up on you,_ and the irritation drains out of him. He stands to one side of the door and puts his back to the wall. She comes out a moment later, lost in thought.

“I really am sorry,” he says quietly. “I won’t keep bugging you about it. But if you think of anything I can do—“

She stops with her back to him, then spins to face him.

“It was cheap. And old. And it was missing a button.” She shrugs and gives him a wicked grin. “I can’t sew on a button to save my life.”

“And yet you made me suffer for a day—a whole day!” He pushes off the wall and falls in step with her.

“Exactly a whole day.” She holds up her watch and he sees the big hand just sweeping past midnight. “That’s the price.”

“Pretty steep,” he says as he leans past her to punch the elevator button.

“You might be right.” She tips her head like she’s considering it. “I may have overcharged by one hot chocolate.”

“Hot chocolate.” He nods, trying to keep his smile in check. “Just so long as it has a lid.” 

_A/N: Dumb dumb dumb dumb DUMMMMMBBBB. Hmmm._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Dumb dumb dumb dumb DUMMMMMBBBB. Hmmm


	12. Shall I Compare Thee—A Rose for Everafter (2 x 12)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The surveillance photos are not traumatic. The folder of them is on her desk when she comes in. She flips through them and spares the last one an eye roll and an exasperated sigh. She flips the folder closed again and mutters So there, Lanie under her breath, which spoils the effect of her blasé response a little, but they are definitely not traumatic.

The surveillance photos are not traumatic. The folder of them is on her desk when she comes in. She flips through them and spares the last one an eye roll and an exasperated sigh. She flips the folder closed again and mutters _So_ there, _Lanie_ under her breath, which spoils the effect of her blasé response a little, but they are definitely not traumatic.

She decides that—no, she _affirms_ it—just a minute or two before he trails in. The timing is convenient, because a little punishment is in order. Because he’s stupid and utterly predictable and such a guy. Punishment has nothing to do with her being traumatized in any way.

So she lectures him about the chair. She impresses even herself with her improv skills and has to bite the inside of her cheek to keep from giving up the game when he turns seventeen shades of red denies in a voice that’s way, way to loud that anyone had yanked anything. It’s a satisfying bit of payback right up to the moment that he confesses.

He confesses. That’s … kind of traumatizing.

It’s not the fact of it. She doesn’t care that he met with the one that got away on a rooftop, and she doesn’t care that he kissed her. It’s not that she’s jealous, whatever Lanie might think, whatever he apparently thinks five seconds later when they’re suddenly sniping at each other—irony of ironies—like an old married couple.

What’s traumatizing is that he’s upset by it. He’s hurt by seeing Kyra again under such bizarre circumstances, and he’s troubled by the whole damned thing—that he wanted to kiss her, that he did kiss her, and that it’s messed up, because the poor woman is dealing with so much right now, and a kiss like that is just piling on. She can see that he’s miserable about it, even though he’s trying to cover by picking a fight with her. Even though she’s rising to the bait and hitting back, she can see that he’s struggling, and all of this is far more complicated than simple jealousy.

She doesn’t really have time to wallow in it. Esposito shows up, the annoying little imp in the machine as always, and then they’re not fighting anymore. Whatever his trauma and her trauma might be, they’re on to Sophie’s odd behavior, and the killer isn’t Kyra, the killer isn’t Greg.

She watches through the yellowed slats of the work room blinds, as he plays Kyra the recording of Greg pushing Sophie away. She watches out of the corner of her eye as Kyra kisses his cheek. The closure for the two of them, twenty years in coming, is so quickly accomplished that she’s almost caught out. As it stands, Kyra stops, coat over her arm, and says _He’s all yours,_ and that’s definitely kind of traumatizing.

Because he _is_ hers, kind of. He’s her friend and something well beyond that. What they are to one another is far more complicated than anything that lives in Lanie’s overactive imagination or Ryan and Esposito’s significant looks, and closure or no, he’s hurting.

It’s why she says yes when he asks her to come to the make-up wedding with him. It’s why she pretends to believe him when he says Kyra told him to extend the invitation, that she and Greg would really like them both to be there. It’s why she pastes on a smile and finds a blouse in a subtle mauve chiffon in the back of her closet, and it’s why she’s almost late picking him up. Because at the last minute, she dashes back into her apartment and hunts through her photo albums. It takes her a while, and she’s already almost late, but she snaps a picture with her phone and dashes out again. 

The ceremony is short and undeniably sweet. There’s a lot of laughter from the dozen or so guests. It’s a little too hearty in places, and each of them has their own reasons for that. He has his own reasons for that, but the belly laugh he lets out when Kyra lobs the bouquet directly at her is genuine enough that she elbows him hard.

They make up the reception as they go along. There’s a small stereo with an iPod hook up and people keep swapping theirs in and out to play the usual things and some not so usual ones as well. The dancing, for whatever reason, flips his brooding switch, so she tugs him out of the corner he’s retreated to for a jazz standard that’s not too slow.

She tells him he should dance with Kyra and he does. He taps Greg on the shoulder and makes a formal bow. The two of them share a handshake that will probably leave them both a little sore for a few days, and he and Kyra smile and tease one another for the length of a song.

She asks if he wants to go not long after that and he nods gratefully. They’re not the only ones breaking up the party and Greg and Kyra are distracted. They’re exhausted, and the farewell is mercifully brief.

“Thank you for doing this,” he says quietly as she pulls to the curb around the corner from his front door. He can’t seem to find anything else to say, but he makes no move to go, either. He leans back hard into the seat, and his eyes close. He’s exhausted, too.

“No problem.” She tries to gauge where he is, what kind of moment this is. “It was fun,” she adds with an absolutely straight face.

 _“Fun?!”_ He rolls his head against the headrest to give her A Look. He’s a total amateur at that, but she knows she got it right. She laughs out the windshield, and she sees him out of the corner of her eye, talking to traffic gliding by. She feels for the phone in her pocket and thinks about the last-minute picture she snapped. She’s wondering what, if anything, to do about that, when he adds, “You really are a mystery, Detective.”

It feels like an opening. A sign, he’d say, and she’d show him how A Look is really done. But it does feel like a sign, so she thumbs the screen on and navigates to her photos.

“Such a mystery,” she says, casually holding the phone out between them.  
“You!” He snatches it from her. She makes a perfunctory attempt to snatch it back, but he’s holding it practically up to his face. “These are … _yikes._ Are those some kind of kangaroo pouches or what?”

“The pouf waist. A friend to no one.” She’s really doing a number on the inside of her own cheek today. “Ditto those balloon off-the-shoulder sleeves.”

“But where … ?” He squints hard, then swivels for a second attempt at A Look. The improvement is modest at best. “None of these is you!”

“Oh, no?” She makes a casual grab for the phone, but he lifts it high and squints again.

“Flower girl!” he shouts very nearly loud enough to rattle the windows. “You’re the gap-toothed little flower girl!”

“I’m _missing_ a tooth,” she protests. She blushes a little at the way he’s poring over the picture. “It’s not a gap.”

“Wow,” he says with genuine awe in his voice. “How old were you?”

“Five?” she thinks about it. “Almost six. Some older cousin. I’m not even sure why she asked me. My parents never talked to her much after the wedding.”

“Obviously not,” he scoffs. “This right here is the start of a feud.” She gives him a puzzled look. He shakes his head like nothing could be more obviously. “Little Katie Beckett upstaged the bride.”   
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Gluuuurrrggge. Hmmm.


	13. In the Air—Sucker Punch (2 x 13)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She smells of whiskey and misery when she flees the precinct on a handful of choked syllables. 

She smells of whiskey and misery when she flees the precinct on a handful of choked syllables. 

_I’m sorry sir, I can’t._

Roy tells him that. He repeats her choked syllables. He repeats his own and shakes head before the question is even out of his mouth— _Should I go after her?_ He offers the same flask. 

He takes it. He feels the lingering warmth of her hands and thinks better of it. 

Whiskey for her. 

He’ll stay at the ready, with eyes wide open and a clear head. He’ll keep watch in case, in her misery, she needs him. 

* * *

She needs him.

She smells of winter and determination when she comes to him. She smells of coffee and men’s cologne mixing with his mother’s perfume when he ushers her inside. 

He can see it almost before she tells him where she’s been. She does’t paint much of a picture— _I said, he said, I said_ —but he catches the scent of men’s cologne in her hair, on the shoulder of her coat, and he can almost see the two of them clinging to one another. 

He’s grateful for that. Grateful that she has someone who knows her exact misery.

* * *

She smells of blood and cordite and desolation when she saves his life. 

There is _so much_ blood everywhere when he crouches near her and tries to do his duty. He tries to pull her back from the edge of this. He thinks of whiskey and coffee and her father’s cologne as he pushes down a wave of nausea and lays a hand on her shoulder. 

_He’s gone. Kate. He’s gone. I am so sorry._

He is snapped in two the whole while. There is the part of him that is quiet and collected, who murmurs in her ear until she is persuaded to move away to step clear of the slow-moving tide of blood that is lapping at her shoes now. There is the part of him that helps her to stand, the part that holds on to make sure she is anything like steady on her feet. 

This part of him spreads his palm wide between her shoulder blades and holds her elbow loosely, gently as she takes her first steps in a world that is fundamentally altered. It tells her, more firmly now, _Kate, get cleaned up. You should go get cleaned up._

This part of him severs the name from the thing in front of them. It is now _the body,_ not _Dick Coonan._ Not even _her mother’s murderer,_ but _the body,_ and that is the purview of others, just as the gun is. Her gun, then not her gun, but a thing lying on the floor, then not lying on the floor, because someone has collected it. It, too, is the purview of others for now, but this part of him clamps down on that fact. 

There’s another part of him all the while though. That part is a jagged landscape of too many things. He smells of fear and— _Oh, God_ —Dick Coonan’s blood matted in his hair. He feels the phantom pulse of a dead man’s heart pounding against his shoulder blade and the hot wash of his breath over his skin. He sees Coonan’s pupils race outward to reach almost the whites of his eyes, and he pictures a hundred, a thousand, who knows how many muscle fibers going slack as the last impulse along every one of his nerves reaches the end of everything.

This part of him wonders how long everything will smell of blood and cordite and desolation.

* * *

She doesn’t smell of cherries when he arrives for the beginning of the end. 

It’s a mercy, given the olfactory melange he has in tow, but he wonders what’s become of the pretty glass pot of lotion at the far back of her most disused desk drawer. He wonders, with a painfully tripping heart, if she disposed of it to spite him, in a dumpster in the dead of night after he’d caught the scent of it, caught her in the act of the tiniest indulgence. 

She smells of unremarkable soap and laundry detergent. She smells of home, and that hurts his heart, too—the fact that he recognizes this only at the end. He registers furniture polish and catches the faintest note of dish soap born of washing one cup, one plate at a time. 

It’s only at the end that he realizes she smells not just of solitude, but loneliness. 

She tells him this in not so many words, and it’s not the end after all. It’s a new world, fundamentally altered. She pulls her knee into her chest, right there in her battered, swiveling desk chair, and he’s overwhelmed by the intimacy.

She doesn’t smell of cherries.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Had a crisis of other writing I needed to do, so this is rushed and blegh. This episode is always tough to write within. Hmmm. 


	14. Newsflash—The Third Man (2 x 14)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She has a late-night milkshake hangover, a day off, and someone is pounding at her door. Only one of these is a good thing. She rolls herself off the couch—because apparently she slept on the couch—and mumbles Coming. Coming! in a sandpaper voice that she can hardly hear, let alone whoever’s on the far side of the door.

She has a late-night milkshake hangover, a day off, and someone is pounding at her door. Only one of these is a good thing. She rolls herself off the couch—because apparently she slept on the couch—and mumbles _Coming. Coming!_ in a sandpaper voice that _she_ can hardly hear, let alone whoever’s on the far side of the door.

She’s out of it. She only just remembers to pull her hands back from the locks to check the peephole first. She plants her palms for balance and blinks the sleep out of one eye. Somewhere beneath the cotton ball layers that are currently lining the inside of her head, she thinks it’s him. She thinks it’s Castle, and she’s ready to read him the riot act for darkening her doorstep—on her day off, no less—when they literally just parted ways a few hours ago.

It’s not Castle, though. One peek, then two, confirms the terrible truth.

“Lanie,” she breathes. It’s practically silent, but the reaction is as immediate and startling as if the name has just summoned the woman from the ether.

 _“Kate, I know you’re in there._ ” Lanie’s fist comes down hard enough to make the safety chain jump. _“You think I won’t make a scene out here? ‘Cause, girl, there’s about to be a scene.”_

Kate makes her clumsy hands work fast. _Fast._ She knows better than to test her friend’s patience.

“Lanie, what—“ She doesn’t have a chance to finish the question. Lanie barges through the door with enough force that it bangs open and jars spindle-legged telephone table under the mirror. A stack of mail goes sliding to the floor. Kate looks at it in despair, too tired and stiff to even think about bending to gather it up.

“What”—Lanie whirls to face her, brandishing a folded newspaper for dramatic effect—“is this?”

“The paper?” Kate’s heart sinks. She drags over to the couch and her body sinks to the cushions. “It’s—it’s in the _paper?”_ She pulls the rumpled blanket to her midsection and buries her face in her hands. It’s half about hiding, half about willing herself into alertness. This is a disaster. “How can it be in the paper?”

“You tell me.” Lanie drops into the armchair at right angles to the couch. She crosses one leg over the other in a posture that says she’s not going anywhere any time soon. “You tell me, Kate Beckett, ‘cause I’m thinking this is quite a story.”

“It’s not!” She turns her palms up to the heavens. “There’s no story. It was late, and we were both hungry. It was a milkshake and some fries. How does that wind up in the paper?” She falls back against the arm of the couch and addresses the ceiling. “Do they just follow him around? Do they have a freakin’ life-style reporter covering the Remi’s beat in case people like him decide to go slum—” She trails off, suddenly disturbed. Lanie is quiet. She’s far too quiet. Kate sits up abruptly, her spine rigid. “Lain … what’s … what’s in the paper?” 

“Nothing as interesting as all that.” Lanie gives her a sly smile as she tosses the paper in the approximate direction of the couch.

She has to make a quick lean to catch it, and she nearly overbalances right off the cushion. She really is _so_ tired, a fact she can see Lanie taking mental note of. Kate curses silently to herself as she spreads the paper open across her knees to find Brad and Amanda eating dessert off one another’s spoons, Brad and Amanda laughing with their heads bent together, Brad “helping” Amanda into a cab, his hand resting far too low on her hip to be at all helpful.

She studies the grainy pictures, and for a moment, she’s faintly amused. She pictures a photographer lurking among the potted plants out front and shooting through the window. Faint amusement slowly fades, though, as the awkwardness of the situation penetrates her late-night milkshake hangover.

“Lanie, I’m sorry,” she begins, “I know Brad’s your friend and I asked you to fix me up, and then I—”

Lanie waves the apology off with an absolute gesture. “Girl, I got myself over her as soon as I saw that to see if we needed to get rid of Brad’s body.” She folds her hands demurely on one knee, looking like the world’s most determined supervillain. “And here I find Brad and Miss Thing running off together is not the breaking news story.”

“There _is_ no breaking news story.” She drags her fingers through her hair. “No body hiding. No breaking news. Nothing to see here.”

“Mm-hmm.” Lanie gives her a skeptical once-over. “Then how come it looks like I got here about ten minutes after you did your walk of shame?” 

“There was no walk of shame!” She undermines her own indignant reply with a reflexive pull of the blanket up to her chin as she realizes—much belatedly—that she not only slept on the couch, she slept in her clothes. “It was just … late.” Her teeth come together hard. She resets. “It was just a _milkshake._ I didn’t even let him pay!”

“So he _tried_ to pay,” Lanie says with a cool nod. “And why was it so late anyway?”

“We were just talking,” she grumbles down at her own knees.

There’s a flutter somewhere around her midsection, though, as she recalls their sudden awareness of the exasperated looks the waitstaff were casting at the table they’d been holding down for hours, apparently. There’s a flutter as she remembers blinking at the tell-tale pink licking at the sky in the east as they finally pushed through the doors into the January cold. There’s a flutter, but she shakes herself out of it.

“Talking. That’s it.” She meets Lanie’s gaze, stone faced. “No ‘breaking news’.”

But Lanie isn't convinced. No one in that particular apartment is exactly convinced. _  
_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Lanie sees what’s going on. Hmmm.


	15. Lacuna—Suicide Squeeze (2 x 15)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He feels restless and strangely out of sorts after he finishes taking care of the casualties of his lack of athletic prowess. Alexis had been over-the-top apologetic, as if she’d been the one responsible for the errant throw. As if something precious had been lost, rather than a few tchotchkes he hardly remembers having.

He feels restless and strangely out of sorts after he finishes taking care of the casualties of his lack of athletic prowess. Alexis had been over-the-top apologetic, as if she’d been the one responsible for the errant throw. As if something precious had been lost, rather than a few tchotchkes he hardly remembers having.

He’d hugged her tight and assured her it was nothing. He’d shooed her upstairs to do her homework, saying he’d take care of his own mess. _For once_ , she’d joked, but there’d been something off about it that had made him pull her back for one more kiss on the top of her head, one more whispered _thank you_ for the gesture. She’d smiled gamely and trotted up the stairs with only the briefest look back, but still … something about it has left him restless.

He throws himself into one of the leather chairs with no clear plan for the immediate future. The glove with the offending ball nestled in the pocket sits within reach. He slips his hand into it, wriggling his fingers until they’re comfortably seated, and entertains a brief Steve-McQueen-in- _The-Great-Escape_ fantasy.

He pictures himself tossing the ball against the brick exterior wall of the office and effortlessly catching it on the carom, all the while writing in his head. That picture gives way to a much more realistic scenario where the ball goes crashing through the glass and clonks some passerby on Broome, five stories down, and Beckett arrests him for manslaughter and general stupidity.

_Beckett._

He sets the glove aside and pulls out his phone. He sets that aside, too almost before he’s even entertained the strange idea of calling her just for the hell of it. Almost a year into their annoyer–annoyee relationship, they don’t call each other just for the hell of it. Or, rather, she doesn’t call him for the hell of it, and if _he_ calls, he always pretends he has an urgent literary issue that requires her expertise.

_Would you say, Detective, that fighting crime in a skirt is viable?_

_How does one decide, day to day, on where to clip their badge? Follow-up question: Don’t you think Esposito looks like he’s escaped from a Day Camp for juvenile offenders when he wears his around his neck?_

_Then_ they talk for the hell of it. Sometimes, anyway. A lot of the time. He thinks through his last few Writer–to-Muse hotline calls and decides that a lot of the time, she’s game to talk just for the hell of it. He’s not sure what that means for this particular moment in time, though. He stares at his cell phone, half hidden by the baseball glove, and doesn’t know what it means for his restlessness.

He plants his palms on the chair’s arms and hauls to his feet. He paces a little, more because it feels like it’s the thing to do when one is feeling restless than from any real desire to pace. He turns just shy of the doorway and makes another lap past the desk. The gravitational pull is too much. He swipes the house phone from its cradle and speed dials.

 _“Too busy for literary emergencies, Castle.”_ She answers on the second ring with no _Hello._

“And yet you picked up.” He hopes she can’t hear how wide his smile is all the way down the line. It’s not that her voice settles him exactly. He’s still restless, still out of sorts. But talking to her has the potential to settle him down. “As ever, I can only aspire to capturing the wheels within wheels—”

 _“Hanging up,”_ she says. 

“It’s not a literary crisis,” he rushes to say. “It’s domestic.” He looks at the glove sitting on the table with the ball waiting to be thrown. He thinks about the broken pieces of tchotchkes he won’t miss, and of the brief glimpse his brave, stoic daughter cast over her shoulder as she trotted up the stairs. “It’s personal.”

The pause that ensues is oddly dramatic. He hears the clatter of dishes and the sound swishing water growing faint. He pictures her at the sink, drying her hands, with the phone braced between ear and shoulder. He pictures her chewing the corner of her lip as she turns her back on the kitchen. He pictures her weighing the options.

 _“What’s up?”_ she asks.

It’s not grudging, not at all, but it’s hesitant, and he suddenly feels silly. He realizes that hasn’t the least idea how to put any of this into words. It’s a raw, vulnerable feeling on multiple fronts, and he’s not at all a fan.

 _Nothing. Never mind. Sorry to bother …_ That’s what’s on the tip of his tongue. His thumb glides over the face of the phone to find the End Call button, but the right hand doesn’t know what the left is doing, apparently. He reaches for the leather glove and the ball dribbles out. It bounds across the room, making a break for the glass wall. It comes to rest at the foot of the low bookcases there.

“Alexis got me a baseball glove,” he finds himself saying. “And one for herself. And a ball.”

 _“That’s … sweet?”_ He can hear the furrow forming on her brow.

“It is.” He inhales the scent of leather and the oil Alexis must have rubbed into pocket. “It’s kind of sad, too, isn’t it?” He hates the clumsiness of the way things are emerging straight into the world. “Trying to give me a normal childhood.”

 _“Normal?”_ Her voice is distant, then close, as if she’s settling in somewhere. _“You and normal. I don’t know if it’s sad, Castle. Just kind of hopeless.”_

  
“Mean, Beckett!” It _is_ mean. It’s just the right amount of mean to make him laugh out loud. “I call you in crisis and you’re mean.”

 _“You’re not in_ crisis,” she says, and he knows she’s rolling her eyes. She’s quiet for a moment. They’re both quiet, then she sidesteps into the silence. _“Maybe it’s not about your childhood. Maybe it’s about hers.”_

“Hers? You mean because I didn’t … ” He stops in is tracks, staring down at the glove he’s been carrying with him the whole time. “Because she didn’t get enough dad things?”

He’s horrified by the prospect. He thinks about dance classes and gymnastics and all the things he shouldered his way into, the only dad in the room, most of the time. He mentally reviews her latter-day hobbies and clubs and interests and it suddenly seems like his kid’s life is nothing but gaps.

“I tried,” he begins miserably.

 _“Castle._ ” She’s laughing. Beckett’s laughing. _“She fences. She could probably go pro at laser tag. She gets plenty of dad things.”_

“Then what …?” He looks helplessly out through the glass to Broome, five stories down.

 _“She got dad things and mom things,”_ she says. _“You did that. Maybe she wants to do the same thing for you.”_

“Like … son things?” His gaze falls on a framed picture of the two of them. It’s post-paintball and their both filthy and smiling wide. “You think she thinks I wanted a son?”

 _“No.”_ She sounds more than a little testy. He opens his mouth to apologize, but she goes on. _“I think—“_ He can hear the way she changes gears mid-sentence. _“My grandmother died when I was six. My mom’s mom.”_ There’s the slightest hitch in her voice before she goes on. _“I remember my mom crying, and I didn’t really understand why.”_ Another hitch. _“And my mom said it was because we’d all miss Nonna.”_ She laughs again, but it’s a quiet thing. _“I told her that_ I _wouldn’t ever miss anyone, because I had her.”_

“Oh!” he exclaims sharply. “Oh.” He has nothing— _nothing_ —to add, because _Oh …_

 _“Yeah.”_ She says through a sad little smile he can picture perfectly. _“‘Oh’ about covers it.”_ Something brushes across the speaker. Her hair, her skin, a gesture that’s not particularly comfortable. _“Maybe Alexis is letting you know she’s … that she has you, so she’s never missed anyone.”_

“Maybe,” he says, wanting and not wanting to believe it. He sets the glove down and stoops to collect the ball at the foot of the low book case. He tosses it softly and catches it in his bare hand. “Maybe that’s it.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Oof. This had to end somewhere. Hmmm.


	16. Dear Prudence—The Mistress Always Spanks Twice (2 x 16)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He shocks pretty easily for a millionaire playboy, for man whose personal life is a matter of public—and occasionally police—record. At first, there’s absolutely nothing not fun about that—the way he goes all Home Alone at Lanie’s monologue regarding her preferred bedroom foodstuffs, how eagerly he hangs on every bondage-related observation she, herself, makes, and then his nonstop attempts to kick off some kind of interrogation about what she knows and how she came to know it? It’s all pure entertainment.

He shocks pretty easily for a millionaire playboy, for man whose personal life is a matter of public—and occasionally police—record. At first, there’s absolutely nothing not fun about that—the way he goes all _Home Alone_ at Lanie’s monologue regarding her preferred bedroom foodstuffs, how eagerly he hangs on every bondage-related observation she, herself, makes, and then his nonstop attempts to kick off some kind of interrogation about what she knows and how she came to know it? It’s all pure entertainment.

The opportunity to use him as dominatrix bait, to say nothing of the way he absolutely freaks out about it, is just the absolute cherry on top of the fun she’s having with this.

“I don’t think you can make me do this,” he grumbles on their way from the precinct to Dungeon Alley. “I am almost positive that none of the paperwork I signed had any legalese about dominatrixes. Dominatrices? Dommes.”

“Established precedent, Castle.” She keeps her eyes fixed straight ahead and clamps down on the grin playing at the corners of her mouth. She’s been waiting damned near a year to get back at him on this. “I thought you’d be excited that we’re dusting off one of your ‘investigative tools’.”

“Dusting off my tool?” Confusion creeps in to his sulky expression. “What?”

She clears her throat and lowers her voice to something closer to his register. “Guuuessss who’s got a date with a dominatrix!”

He’s not amused, which makes it all the more amusing. She relishes her role through the whole song and dance with the receptionist. She’s on fire with it, leaving him with no choice but to play along. He does, though she suspects it’s method acting for him. He trails after her with his chin buried in the collar of his coat and his cheeks aflame as his head whips from side to side at the sights and sounds around them as they make their way down the narrow corridor.

Things shift dramatically with entrance of Lady Irena herself, though. It’s not precisely all in fun, then. It’s damned useful, for one thing. The dominatrix-cum-small-business-owner is tough as nails. Their information about what, exactly, Jessica Margolis had been up to activates the woman’s formidable shields, and it looks like the interrogation is going to be over almost before it starts.

But Lady Irena’s attention is strangely divided. She can’t resist him. She can’t resist the _challenge_ of him, and isn’t that peculiar? Because, on the surface, he’s no challenge at all. His tongue is practically lolling out of his head, and his eyes can’t decide whether to come to rest somewhere on the intricate outfit she’s bound up in or the bare skin peeking through it. On the surface, Mistress Irena has him in the palm of her hand, so why is she bothering with the hard sell?

The fact that she _is_ bothering is too useful for Kate to really question it in the moment. It exposes the weak spots, such as they are, in Lady Irena’s patent leather armor, but she files it away—the possibility that there might be something a little more complicated going on with the easily shocked Mr. Castle than she’s appreciated in the midst of all the fun.

He thinks he’s getting away with something, she realizes. A tell-tale grin flickers across his face as he takes in Mistress Sapphire’s vaguely police-themed get up. He sees her eyes narrow and he tucks it away, but it’s too late. She’s already seen that it’s a little too hungry, a little too knowing, and not at all easily shocked. She files _that_ away, too, because now they’re on to motive and means for Tyler Benton.

They hash out that scenario on the drive back to the precinct. Mostly he does. She’s driving and getting Ryan and Esposito on the phone so that they have Tyler back in the box as soon as humanly possible, but all the while, she takes in the wild imaginings he can’t seem to turn off.

“I don’t think the cuffs were _just_ about staging.” He’s practically rubbing his hands together. “No, not at all. I mean, come on, that’s an expensive ‘joke,’ isn’t it? A custom order when Love Shackle Barry is pushing the bargain basement faux fur cuffs?” He shakes his head. “No, no no, I don’t buy that for a minute. The murder, the staging—that rage wasn’t just about Jessica playing dominatrix with strangers. That was about Tyler realizing she’d been topping from the bottom all along.”

They pull up in front of the precinct at that exact moment. She throws the car into park at the curb. He’s still babbling as he reaches for the door handle. She jams her finger on the button, snapping the locks shut, and fixes him with a glare.

“What?” The mask of innocence—of shock at the seamy world they’ve wandered into—slides back into place, but it’s too late. He knows it’s too late, and still, he postures. _“What?”_

She invades his space from the driver’s seat, and there’s a metaphor for you. “What game are you playing, Castle?”

“Game?” She has to give it to him—he’s committed to the bit.

“Topping from the bottom?” She arches an eyebrow. “Not exactly in the vanilla vocabulary.”

“Novelist. I read,” he says cooly, but he knows he’s been caught. The mask drops entirely and suddenly it’s her cheeks aflame as his gaze drags up and down her body. “I … research.”

“Research.” She chews up the word and spits it out. She releases the locks with the side of her fist and slams the driver’s side door with more force than necessary.

“Research indeed, Detective.” The entirely too cheerful words are broken up by the jog he drops into. He races past her and sweeps open the precinct door with a bow. “The world needs to know: Does Nikki Heat prefer sticky or slippery?” _  
_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Happy Thanksgiving—to those who celebrate (and happy Thursday to those who don’t)—from the Love Shackle. Hmmm.


	17. Wanderer—Tick, Tick, Tick . . . (2 x17)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Paris could solve all their problems. Well. Maybe not all of them, but their immediate problems, anyway. He could take her to Paris, well out of harm’s way, until Jordan Shaw and her Traveling Toy Emporium apprehend their friend with the .45, a pen knife, and too much time on his hands.

Paris could solve all their problems. Well. Maybe not _all_ of them, but their immediate problems, anyway. He could take her to Paris, well out of harm’s way, until Jordan Shaw and her Traveling Toy Emporium apprehend their friend with the .45, a pen knife, and too much time on his hands.

It’s the sign in her kitchen, the one with the arrow pointing left, that sparks his sudden meditation on the City of Light, but it really only gives him a destination. She is what sparks the desire in him to offer—to legitimately, in his outside-his-head-voice offer, even though she will glare so hard—to get her out of Dodge for the foreseeable future.

She’s unbelievable. Not in a good way, currently. She’s got a stubborn glint in her eye, and he’s alarmed at how cavalier she’s being about all this—sending her security detail home, opening the door to strange men bearing wine, picking petty fights about the woman leading the team that currently represents their best shot at catching this guy.

She’s not exactly governed by her better impulses tonight, and under other circumstances, he’d find that … intriguing, promising, rife with potential. In Paris, he’d find that positively delightful, but Paris is off the table. She’s annoyed enough by the wine, by the entire subject of Jordan Shaw, by his very presence that he never does get to offer. He never gets to see if he’d survive The Glare. 

But he sees that worrisome, stubborn glint in her eye and decides that if he can’t take her to Paris, he’ll damned well make sure her dangerous impulses don’t go sneaking out after curfew. Not without him, anyway.

So he stands his ground when she tries to kick him out. He shoulders the blame for the danger she’s in and doesn’t rise to the bait when she points out that he is, at best, _de trop_ when it comes to providing personal security services. He settles back on to her couch with two generous pours of wine, then rapidly _un_ settles. He thinks better of the wine and his relatively comfortable position.

She is … determined. And she’s preternaturally stealthy for the most trivial of reasons, like startling a girly scream out of him in full view of everyone in the bullpen. She’s more than capable of sneaking past him, should that remarkable, stubborn brain of hers produce some idea that she thinks will lead her right to the killer without his help, without Jordan Shaw’s help, without anyone’s help.

“This is a tragedy,” he tells the wine, sadly. He takes one long, regretful breath, inhaling its bouquet one last time as he gets to his feet and heads for the kitchen sink. He stalls for a moment, shoving the cork back into the remainder of the bottle before he tips the glass over the stainless steel and watches the blood-dark liquid swirl down the drain. He lifts his eyes to Paris again and sighs. “You really could have been the answer.”

He doesn’t let himself go back to the couch. He’s long since started feeling the strain of the day and he can’t risk nodding off. He slowly walks the perimeter of the apartment instead. He snoops, not to put too fine a point on it, though the apartment itself—the contours of it—have plenty to capture his attention before he dives into the signs of her occupation of it.

He ducks his head where the ceiling slants lowest and runs a finger along the row of book spines on the shelf above the lunette window. He studies the eclectic mix of furniture—slender-legged nesting tables that seem too old fashioned for her, and arm chairs of wildly different styles, all scattered to the four corners of the room.

He wonders where it all came from, the rustic painted-wood desk by the door and the curious white-leather ottoman that doubles as a coffee table. He wonders if it’s mostly hand-me-downs that she lives with because she has been absolutely laser-focused on her career since she was barely out of her teens, or if they’re things that just caught her eye as she wandered in and out of dimly lit vintage stores.

He casts a glance back over his shoulder at her kitchen table with its seating for four and thinks about the dust on all but one wine class, all but one coffee cup, all but one plate sitting on the drainboard by the sink, and the fact that she was eating out of a carton with throw-away chopsticks when he arrived.

There’s too much melancholy in contemplating all that, so he turns his attention to her books. They’re positively everywhere. They’re stacked in haphazard piles on tables and snugged into the painted-desk cubbies, every which way to make the most of the available space. They’re lined up in short rows on bracket shelves and they fill actual bookcases opportunistically filling in the gaps along the walls.

It all has a well-used feeling that makes him smile. These aren’t books that sit there for show, slid off and back on again once a week when she dusts. There’s no obvious rhyme or reason to what he finds where, suggesting that she returns to them again and again—that she has several going at once and she tucks them away wherever there’s space when she tidies up.

The one exception is the stretch of travel books. It’s a well-established theme that occupies a long, low bookcase of its own. They’re new, they’re old. At a glance, they seem to cover the entire globe. He offers up another sigh for Paris.

He sizes up the spines and pulls the thickest one without regard for its destination. _China,_ he reads, and he notes that it’s an older one. He riffles the pages and sees dog ears and marginalia in handwriting that isn’t hers. He settles into striped armchair with it. The back of the chair runs straight up and down and the cushion has seen better days. It’s uncomfortable, and that suits his purpose exactly.

The hefty travel guide is his back-up plan. If he does start to nod off in the diabolical chair, he can count on _China_ to mash his toe—or some far more vulnerable part of his anatomy. They might not always have Paris. They might never have Paris, although that sounds stupid to him. It sounds unbelievable. But in any case, they have _China_ tonight. _China_ and an uncomfortable chair. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: He stayed up all night reading a China travel guide, friends. It is known. Hmmm.


	18. Aspect—Boom! (2 x 18)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She doesn’t mean to wander. There’s no real question of actually getting any sleep, but she means, at least, to stay in the guest room like a good … well, guest. But her mind is cycling through too much to stay in the bed—too much even for the awkward tip-toe pacing she does a few times around the perimeter of the room.

She doesn’t mean to wander. There’s no real question of actually getting any sleep, but she means, at least, to stay in the guest room like a good … well, guest. But her mind is cycling through too much to stay in the bed—too much even for the awkward tip-toe pacing she does a few times around the perimeter of the room.

She has considered and rejected every single book on the shelves, on and in the bedside tables. She’s examined every objet d’art on every horizontal surface. She’s practically memorized the framed pieces hanging on the walls, and she’s picked up, grinned over, and put back down again every overflow picture of Alexis, Martha and Alexis, him and Alexis that’s made its way here.

She’s made a thorough study of the honestly quite lovely room while loss and horror and frustration roll like thick, battleship clouds just beneath the surface of her restless mind. Dunn’s shrine, flames licking at irreplaceable photographs just like these, the photos of Gloria Rodriguez’s body, ghostly and mid-air translucent on the smart board in the War Room—it all rolls just beneath the surface. It overcomes all sense of propriety, all sense of shame at the very idea of wandering someone else’s house in the dead of night.

She crosses the threshold on the balls of her feet. She winds slowly, slowly down the hallway, not quite trailing the fingertips of one hand along the wall. She makes her way down the stairs and pauses, unsure of her destination. She thinks about the kitchen—about the boxes of tea he’s left out in case she wants them, but her feet strike out in another direction, across the living room. She luxuriates in the thick pile of the rug. She winds up at the piano.

It’s something she’s wondered about the dozen or so times she’s been here. Does he play? Does Alexis? Do they plunk out the standard four-hand version of “Heart and Soul” together? She’s wondered, but it’s not the piano itself that draws her tonight. It’s the dense forest of photos on top. She kneels up on the bench and carefully braces herself on the piano’s lid.

She cranes up to study the larger frames further back. Here’s Alexis as a chubby, alien-looking infant, and her again, looking serious as a toddler in the frilliest dress possible. And there she is as a little girl in sturdy-looking overalls with her hands full of autumn leaves. She tucks one leg underneath herself and leans in to peer closely at the tinier shots up front of the two of them smiling hard at the camera from a recital stage, from a mall Santa’s knee, from a muddy soccer field in front of the goal.

“Hey.” His voice is as soft as he can make it, but it’s the dead of night. The loft is absolutely silent, but for one syllable and the sound of her own breath. It should probably startle her, but it doesn’t. It seems inevitable. “What’s got you up?” He arrives next her as he says it. They share a knife’s-edge grin at the ridiculous question: What doesn’t have her up?

“Jordan Shaw,” she says, even though he’s not really expecting an answer. Even though this answer, such as it is, is just a tiny sliver of what’s cycling through her mind.

He regards her for a moment, too tired to be surprised. Or maybe, as ever, too interested in every last thing on her mind.

“Come on.” He nods toward the center of the living room and urges her up from the piano bench. “That’ll kill your back.” He leans over and leers. “And your butt.“

He herds her on to the couch, snagging some kind of heavenly soft throw from the back and handing it to her before he settles into the wide chair nearby. It’s the one occupied by the large rag doll. She’s wondered about that, too. She fusses with the blanket to hide a grin as he hugs the doll to himself without a shred of self-consciousness.

“So.” He lets out a huge yawn. “Jordan Shaw. Not so understanding about getting kicked off the case after all?” He shoots her a conspiratorial look. “Do we need to take her down? I know a—” He stops and thinks about it. “Yeah, I definitely know a guy who can get dirt on her.” 

“No dirt.” She laughs quietly at the total picture of his bedhead, his bloodlust, and the floppy companion he’s still holding carefully on his lap. “I was just thinking about …” She shakes her head. “I feel stupid about her being a mom. Being surprised about it.”

“She’s not exactly cuddly,” he offers.

“But you weren’t surprised.” He gives a noncommittal shrug. “I shouldn’t have been surprised.” She worries the soft edge of the blanket between her fingers and sifts through what’s risen to the surface of her mind just now, why it’s this of all things that she’s bringing up. “My mom was like that. Totally driven, totally committed to her work.”

“And still a great mom.” The corners of his eyes crinkle up in a soft smile. “Tricky but possible.”

“A great mom.” That’s hard for her. Somewhere along the way it got harder to think about—to talk about—her mom’s life than her death. That’s what Special Agent Jordan Shaw, Mother Extraordinaire, has brought up tonight. That’s what this whole place—a shrine to father and daughter, mother and son—has brought up. “And my dad, too. They were a team, and I never—” She clears her throat. “I think I was a teenager before I realized how busy they both were. All the time. But they never said no to anything. They never missed anything.”

“They did it together.” His smile loosens a little. Wistfulness creeps in as he makes the doll’s floppy arms dance a rapid patter across his thighs. “That’s possible, too, I hear.”

He rolls his eyes, making a joke of it, and she has to think hard to recall Meredith, stiff and posed and painfully aware of the camera, in her few appearances. Kate opens her mouth to … apologize or something, but his expression changes—it turns serious and a little shy.

“It’s always worth it.” He lifts a rag doll hand, along with his own, toward the forest of picture frames on the piano. “Whatever you have to do. It’s always worth it.” 

“My dad says that.” She has a vivid memory—a rapid-fire gallery, really—of her mom rushing up the bleachers, sliding into a seat in her high school auditorium with her briefcase barely closed. Worth it, Katie. Of course it’s worth it. “And my mom said it all the time.” She shakes her head. “Jordan … I don’t know why I was surprised.”

“It happens.” He shrugs again. “You think of people as one thing, but they’re lots of things. Everyone is.”

“Everyone is,” she repeats. She feels a curious cracking sensation inside. Not painful, exactly, but startling as the truth of it settles on him, on her, and on the two of them together. “Everyone.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Hmmm.


	19. Itinerant—Wrapped up in Death (2 x 19)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She’s being damnably coy about where she’s living. since she shook the dust of Casa de Castle with rather unflattering haste after they put Scott Dunn away. He sort of assumed she’d be staying with her dad. He finds out by mere chance that she isn’t. They cross paths one morning in front of the precinct. He’s a little earlier than usual, she’s a little late.

She’s being damnably coy about where she’s living since she shook the dust of Casa de Castle with rather unflattering haste after they put Scott Dunn away. He sort of assumed she’d be staying with her dad. He finds out by mere chance that she isn’t. They cross paths one morning in front of the precinct. He’s a little earlier than usual, she’s a little late.

“Are you lost, Detective?” He calls out to her from the top marble step. “And you a life-long New Yorker.”

She ignores question and the follow-up jibe. She brushes past him and through the revolving door into the lobby.

“Seriously, where were you?” He trots to catch up with her before she can jam the _Door Close_ button on the elevator.

“What do you mean where was I?”

It’s deflection. He sees it in the tap of her foot and the way she keeps her eyes on the light above the doors as it glides from floor to floor. It’s not just garden variety under-caffeination. It’s evasion.

“No line in from your dad’s out of that station.” He twists in place trying to orient himself to the outside world. He gestures in what he thinks is the direction of the subway station she must’ve been coming from.

“Why would I be coming from my dad’s?” she asks with her brows drawn together. There’s a sliver of a pause that he thinks about jumping into, but then her head whips toward him. “Why do you know where my dad lives, anyway?”

  
The doors open before he can answer. Esposito’s calling for her across the bullpen and there’s no opportunity for follow-up, not then, not for a long while after.

“So you found a place, then?”

He kind of knows it’s a mistake, even as the question slides right out into the world. She’s annoyed with all the _to-_ ing and _fro-_ ing they’ve been finding themselves doing on this case—museum to precinct and back again. She’s annoyed with the traffic and the noise and the sidewalks clogged with New Yorkers who’ve long been suffering from cabin fever. She’s _really_ annoyed with the fact that every good suspect they have is turning out to be aggravatingly innocent. Or at least not guilty of murdering Will Medina. 

“A place for what?” She glowers up and down the street, checking for traffic both ways. She crosses against the light with absolutely no regard for the number of near-death experiences he’s had in the last twenty-four hours.

He grits his teeth, offers up a prayer for his late, lamented—and not exactly cheap, thank you very much—jeans, and gives chase. “A place. To stay. To live. You found one.”

“I’m not _homeless,_ Castle,” she calls over her shoulder.

She lengthens her already impressive stride and pulls further away from him, a _Conversation Over_ move, if ever he saw one. But she seems to have forgotten that he sees that move ten times an hour, yet he remains undaunted.

“Glad to hear it.” He tries and fails to disguise the fact that he’s breathing hard as he pulls level with her. “So where are you currently being not homeless?”

“Why do you _care?”_ She stops suddenly and rounds on him. She throws her hands up. “Are you not getting enough quality time to annoy me at the precinct, in the car, out here?”

It’s a strange moment. Terrible and strange, and her outburst ends as abruptly as it began. It stings, but he downshifts into sarcasm. Apparently saving her life and taking her into his home isn’t going to score him a change of address card.

“Well, I _was_ going to get you a housewarming gift.” He lifts his chin high and steps past her to press the button for the crosswalk. “But it might annoy you to see it lying around … wherever.”

“Castle …” she begins, but the light changes, and he’s off. It’s his turn to stride ahead. It’s her turn to have to catch up. “It’s a short-term place. It’s far away from … everything.”

She’s talking to his back. She’s calling after him, and for a stinging moment, he’s inclined to keep on letting her. They’re on the periphery of the park now, and there are plenty of obstacles that’d let him keep his lead.

“It sucks,” she says flatly, and the unhappiness in her voice pulls him right around. “It’s small, and it’s dark, and it sucks.”

“I’m sorry.” He closes the distance between them. There’s a pretzel cart that would like to mow them both down, so he takes her arm and side steps her to a vacant bench that doesn’t look too suspect. He sits and pats the space beside him. “How short term?”

“Another couple months at least?” She shrugs and sinks to the bench. “Everything’s in boxes.” She snorts and gestures with her chin. “It’s like a damned museum basement.”

“You haven’t … settled at all?” he asks carefully. She studies the knot of her hands dangling between her knees and shakes her head. “You don’t want to know what’s in the boxes,” he says quietly.

“I don’t want to know what’s _not_ in them.” She gives him a grim, sideways smile. “How much is gone.”

There’s nothing he can say to that. He feels the pang of loss and tries to imagine how much worse it is for her—how many stupid little losses will keep unfolding for her over months and months, and how many precious things are gone for good.

“Maybe I should look on the bright side,” she says after a while. “I get to go crazy with a new decorating scheme.” She shivers in the brisk April air. “Eventually, anyway.”

“You could go museum chic! Like our vic!” He rises and holds a hand out to her. She ignores it of course, and they fall into step. “Are you more into shrunken heads or that sweet case of monkey skulls?”  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: You know Beckett is Team Monkey Skulls. Hmmm.


	20. Exploding. Plastic. Inevitable—The Late Shaft (2 x 20)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She’s not sure why she’s watching this. She’d like to blame Ryan. She does blame Ryan for tuning in and turning the volume up. But it’s not like the world’s biggest Richard Castle fanboy has glued her butt to the chair or anything. She could get up and walk away. She could head to the break room or, God forbid, home and spare herself the lame monologue and the totally unnatural conversation. She doesn’t have to watch, but she is.

She’s not sure why she’s watching this. She’d like to blame Ryan. She does blame Ryan for tuning in and turning the volume up. But it’s not like the world’s biggest Richard Castle fanboy has glued her butt to the chair or anything. She could get up and walk away. She could head to the break room or, God forbid, home and spare herself the lame monologue and the totally unnatural conversation. She doesn’t have to watch, but she is.

He looks weird. She snarks for the record about the ten extra pounds his ego is toting, but he really does look weird. She figures it’s the make-up. She’s used to seeing the Ellie Monroes of the world slathered and in soft-focus, she’s used to Bobby Manns and Hank McPhees looking more and more like ventriloquist’s dummies every night, but she’s not used to him looking so bright and artificial.

He looks like himself the next morning. She’s more relieved than she’d ever admit, even under the most enhanced interrogation tactics. She’s relieved that he’s his vain, slightly metrosexual—yet still somehow haphazardly shaved—self as he barges into the gym to bombard her with conspiracy theories. She’s a sweaty mess, and he’s put together like he is almost always, but she studies his face and it’s a relief to see that he’s not that two-dimensional, slightly plastic version she watched cuddling up to Ellie Monroe on a terrible suede couch.

And then the morning after that, he looks like he could use the make-up. He looks like he’s had a long night and she tells him so. She snarks for the record and he confirms it, and why should that surprise her? Why should that be just as upsetting, in its own way, as slightly plastic Richard Castle?

It’s not upsetting. That’s the answer she comes up with. It’s completely immaterial to her who he is or with whom he spends the long night of the soulless. She tries to tell anyone who’ll listen that it’s completely immaterial to her, but anyone who’ll listen is not exactly a cast of thousands. Ryan gives her an opening.

_Aren’t famous people crazy and narcissistic?_

_I don’t know. Gotta ask Castle._

Her response is devastating. She’s absolutely cool and casual as she delivers it, but the boys don’t seem to notice. They certainly don’t stick around for everything she’d like to add about famous people and how unbelievably shallow they are. How fake.

There’s a morning after that and a morning after that and he could use the make-up. He at least has the decency to try to hide it the first time, except the second time reveals it’s got nothing to do with decency. It’s just a game to him

_How can you tell this time?_

He just wants to know how the magic trick is done, except it’s not a magic trick at all. It’s just her seeing what he is. She thinks about the make-up, the two-dimensional him, and she’s glad now that she watched the other night. She’s glad to have her sense of what’s real and what’s not recalibrated.

And then there’s Ellie Monroe, live from the Twelfth Precinct. That’s … harder than it should be. It’s not what she expects.

But first comes Weisberg and the box. First comes the revelation about who Ellie Monroe is, and she can’t quite stifle her smirk. She can’t quite tamp down that slithering, mean sense of triumph, but even in that moment, she’s no happier with herself than she’s been with him these last few days.

She shouldn’t care. That’s what flares up in the immediate aftermath. She doesn’t care what he gets up to with anyone, let alone the slathered, soft-focus starlets of the world. That’s the narrative she runs with when she has Ellie Monroe on the phone and the woman breathily declares that she’ll have to go through “her people” if she wants an interview.

But Ellie Monroe, in the flesh—the slightly plastic flesh—is different. She is subdued. She’s _unhappy_ when she’s traversing the corridor from the elevator to the interview room with a uniform glued to her side. She tries to catch his eye. She raises a perfectly manicured hand, but he’s abruptly busy. He looks away, preoccupied with the file folder he picks up from her desk and he tries to read it, but she can see from here—she and Ellie Monroe can both see— that it’s upside down. There’s color on his cheeks and color on Ellie Monroe’s, dark enough to show through the make-up.

And the woman is unhappy all through the rote answers she gives: _Yes, the Essex House Hotel. Yes, all night. No, he could not have left without her knowing._ She’s unhappy, and as much as Kate would like to think that’s all about the fact that this woman, for once, got caught, she can see it isn’t entirely true. Even through her own practiced apathy and residual, slithering triumph, she can see it runs deeper than that. Maybe not much, but deeper.

He’s himself again. He sees the two of them emerge from the interview room. He knows the truth and he’s himself. Ellie Monroe makes her way back to the elevator, and he waves this time. She hangs her head, and when Kate quietly confirms what he already knows, he’s himself.

Someone has to give him grief, and he shoulders the burden. She’s lost her taste for it in the mean time, so that’s all well and good. Her attention is taken up with who he is and who he isn’t, why she cares and why she doesn’t.

She thinks she has it sorted out. She thinks she knows how she feels about him and make-up and the slightly plastic version that’s who he is sometimes. She thinks she’s fine with that, but she’d still like to grab a burger with the version he is most of the time.

But he turns her down. He says the word date, and what flares up in her is a mess of hurt and indignation—for herself, for him, for who he’s supposed to be. For who he is most of the time.

But it’s a date with his daughter, and his pleasure—his naked, eye-crinkling joy—pushes everything to the far reaches. He hardly stops to gloat over the fact that he’s caught her out, that she’s tipped her hand.

He hardly stops to gloat that she cares who he is. She cares who he’s not.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Oof. I am not having a good day. Hmmm.


	21. Oblation—Den of Thieves (2 x 21)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The first thing he ever gave her, a signed, advance copy of Storm Fall, she threw in the trash. He never held it against her. She was mad—really mad—about the whole grand theft murder file thing. Plus, she had him cuffed right afterward, which has always pretty much been their version of Let’s kiss and make up. And anyway, he has it on good authority—**cough** Ryan **cough**—that she’d fished the book back out of the trash, so that’s a check in the Win column.

The first thing he ever gave her, a signed, advance copy of _Storm Fall,_ she threw in the trash. He never held it against her. She was mad— _really_ mad—about the whole grand theft murder file thing. Plus, she had him cuffed right afterward, which has always pretty much been their version of _Let’s kiss and make up._ And anyway, he has it on good authority—* _*cough** Ryan **cough**_ —that she’d fished the book back out of the trash, so that’s a check in the _Win_ column.

The second thing he ever gave her was a misfire and not a misfire at all. He sent the dress, not to annoy her, but because he knew she’d need it. And, okay, _fine_ —a little bit to annoy her, but it was early days then, and annoyance was the only kind of reaction he seemed to be able to get out of her. Until the dress, anyway, and then she gave him a smile and a quiet thank you, and all night she was a little starry-eyed about the damned thing. All night, he’d caught her smoothing her hands down the close fit over her hips and laughing a delighted, little-girl laugh at the way the ballroom lights struck fire in the crystals all along the bodice.

The third thing he ever gave her, she shoved right back in his face. But, hey, who doesn’t love a bear claw?

The fourth thing was not a gift. Not for her, anyway. _You dredged up my past for you._ She was right about that, though she might not know the whole of it. Hell, he might not know the whole of it, even now, but he understands that it was nothing like a gift.

He stopped counting after that, mostly. He tried to send her things endlessly in the weeks that bled into months, and every single one came back. And then when she would talk to him again—when she had to talk to him again—he offered her a pony. He offered up anything she could have possibly wanted, save leaving her alone, and she wouldn’t take him up on it. But she took him back, and so he stopped counting.

But he’s given her another book— _her_ book, this time—and he knows that she ate it up. He knows that _I haven’t gotten to it yet_ was entirely about torturing him, but see above re: _Let’s kiss and make up._

He’s given her a thank you gift for egg-sitting Feggin and presented her with the collected works of The Blue Pill. He _tried_ to give her the multivolume posthumous tribute to Haley Blue, but she had casually ticked off no fewer than seven ways to kill a man with a CD jewel case before he’d backed off that. To this day, she casually ticks off all the ways to kill a man with the lacy _Something Blue_ garter that had showed up anonymously on her doorstep, not long after she caught Kyra’s bouquet—but that, of course, has nothing at all to do with him.

He’s filled the candy dish on her desk who knows how many times by now (and gotten her a better candy dish, because that thing was kind of gross) and had Joe Torre leave a very belated _Happy Birthday_ voice mail. He’s presented her with her dad’s watch, restored to working order, and snuck mints on to the pillows in the guest room when she was homeless and case-less.

He’s bought her pretzels on the street and brought her hot dogs in the middle of the night. He’s showed up on Sunday mornings at breakfast time with General Tso’s chicken, because her eating habits are breathtakingly bad for someone who is obviously dangerously, devastatingly fit. He has tried (and failed) to buy her a milkshake and a burger and a heaping order of french fries.

But mostly, he’s brought her coffee.

He saw a great need, early on. He saw that Esposito would hand her a cup, more out of self-preservation than anything, it seemed, on freezing cold mornings or late, late nights. But he also saw that Esposito was unreliable, and worse, unworthy. He would hand her a cup from the most unspeakable places and she would wince and drink it down anyway, whether it was burnt or weak, tepid or thick as mud.

He’d caught her in the act, not long after. He’d spied her from a distance one morning, in front of the coffee truck that was well past the precinct doors from her subway station. She’d been hopping from foot to foot for a good long while in the sudden, unseasonable cold. He’d hung back, well out of sight, then tipped the guy at the window an absolutely obscene amount to find out her order—her _real_ order.

Since then, he’s brought her coffee. He’s brought her paper cups, snug in their java jackets at dozens of scenes, and he’s brought her piping hot Americanos too big to be advisable right at her desk. He’s pulled her perfect shots and topped them with impeccable layers of foam. He’s dashed through traffic to grab her a cup on the fly when he sees a caffeine headache pinching her right between the brows.

He’s brought her coffee.

He brings her coffee.

But not today.

_It’s okay. Demming already brought some.  
_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Ouch. Hmmm.


	22. Semiotic—Food to Die For (2 x 22)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It’s not an engagement ring.

_It’s_ not _an engagement ring._

She hears her mother’s voice every morning when she creaks open the picture-top wooden box and reaches for the coiled chain resting within. She pauses every time, just for a fraction of a second, to let the ring dance. She studies its ornate setting with its old-fashioned hands supporting the dark, tiny stone and hears her mother’s voice.

Some times it’s conspiratorial. It comes with a wink and a _Katie_ appended. Other times it’s impatient, a little bit of a growl over her shoulder with or without _Jim_ —or worse still, _James_ —tacked on, because it was and it wasn’t a bone of contention between them. And some times it’s serious. It’s the grown-up tone she remembers her mom using with her, almost always.

It’s _not_ an engagement ring, exactly. It wasn’t one.

 _I wasn’t to be bought or sold,_ her mom would say if she was telling the story in high spirits. _And yet_ , her dad would add, reaching for her left hand and holding it up where the stone would glitter for all to see. She’d swat at him, he’d hold fast to her hand and brush a kiss over her knuckles—a positively scandalous PDA for Jim Beckett.

In her grown-up to grown-up moments, while the two of them cooked side by side or Kate helped put together leaflets and press packets for her legal organization, she’d get the real story—all the serious facets of the real story, and she’d drink in every glimpse of the kind of young woman her mother had been.

I _was always crazy about him,_ her mom would say with a rare and particular version of her ready smile. _I was all for getting married._

 _It was about the ring_ , Kate would add, knowing her lines perfectly. _And Dad was stubborn._

 _Was?_ Her mom would roll her eyes and the two of them would laugh. Then her mom would lower the pitch of her voice and imitate her dad’s clipped manner. _A diamond, Johanna. That’s how it’s done. It’s how the world knows a man’s intentions._

_But you didn’t want a diamond,_ she’d say, and her mother would nod. She’d tell her about the girls from the neighborhood where her mom had grown up, who lived and died for them—too often literally. She’d give Kate a primer on the bloody history of diamond mines and the quite-recent invention of the whole tradition.

 _A high school lecture tour, Katie!_ She’d stop whatever she was doing at this point. She’d gesture emphatically with a chef’s knife or a stapler. _Despicable. Utterly despicable!_

Kate would roll her eyes, sometimes, because when she was eight, ten, twelve, she could hardly imagine why. When she was eight, ten, twelve, she sometimes wanted a mom who wasn’t always lecturing about injustice and exploitation and a symbol never being just a symbol. But even when she was eight, ten, twelve, she loved that her mom never talked down to her—that she told her serious stories that made her think, whether she wanted to or not.

 _It’s_ not _an engagement ring._

She hears her mother’s voice, wildly out of context, as he stands, with fog rolling out of the immense walk-in freezer gaping open behind him, holding out what is unequivocally an engagement ring, an immense, classic solitaire set in yellow gold. Her heart does a rapid up and down thing like a roller coaster at parking lot church carnival, and she has to bring her teeth together hard to keep a laugh from slipping out.

He sees it, though. Some expression slipping across her face that he needs to, wants to, absolutely must know everything about, and that pulls her together. She snatches the ring from his hand with the most careless, business-like gesture she can muster and turns the conversation to the fact that they’ve combed through Wolf’s life and it’s not exactly overflowing with potential intendeds. She dangles the mystery in front of him, and it does the job. It steers his mind into less dangerous waters, but doesn’t do much for her own. 

It might be Madison. It might be the fact that it’s been longer than she can remember since she’s sat down with someone, other than her dad, who remembers her mom’s voice, her mom’s laugh, and the way she’d interrupt her own serious stories with a bawdy joke the two of them could only wrap their ninth-grade minds part way around.

Whatever it is, she misses her mom fiercely, and for once it’s more even than that. She’s lonely. She feels at sea, and as she watches Madison hold the ring in its plastic evidence bag up to what light there is in the workroom, she almost says something.

Her heart does another roller coaster move at the memory of him with his purple shirt open at the throat and the line of his shoulders underscored by nearly black velvet of his jacket. She sees the ring in his outstretched hand, and the whole story almost spills out of her—him and her and not them at all, and now Tom and candlelight takeout.

The whole story almost spills out of her, but she realizes she doesn’t know it. Him and her and not them at all. She really has no idea what the story is. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Hmmm. Apparently Johanna Beckett had Thoughts about Cecil Rhodes and mid-century Madison Avenue shenanigans. Who knew?


	23. Miscast—Overkill (2 x 23)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It’s been a while since writing was any kind of escape. Off and on, it’s served well enough for that, but it’s been a while. With Derrick Storm, writing became a chore . For years it had been a chore. The character had been a weight around his neck for far too long before he worked up the nerve to kill him off.

It’s been a while since writing was any kind of escape. Off and on, it’s served well enough for that, but it’s been a while. With Derrick Storm, writing became a chore. For years it had been a chore. The character had been a weight around his neck for far too long before he worked up the nerve to kill him off.

Except he didn’t exactly work up the nerve. He killed off Derrick Storm—he teased killing off Derrick Storm to the press long before he’d written a word of _Storm Fall_ —in a fit of pique at Gina, at a life that had somehow gotten rigid and utterly uninteresting. No, killing Derrick wasn’t about nerve.

As for Nikki, writing her has never been an escape. She’s always been … a continuation. A seamless elaboration of challenging, invigorating, _long_ days and nights that reliably leave his mind constantly simmering and his impatient fingers tapping out words, phrases, sentences, pages when he really should be sleeping, eating, having some kind of life outside of Nikki, but he hasn’t had much of one for more than a year now. He hasn’t wanted one.

He doesn’t want one now, but that’s what he suddenly has. A life most pointedly outside of Nikki and the prospect is painful, so he’s writing.

He’s trying to write, and suddenly it’s an escape.

He is stupidly heartsore over this. He is stupidly, _adolescently_ angry about Demming and the way she was kissing him right there in the precinct, because Nikki is not the kind of woman who would kiss _anyone_ right there in the precinct, let alone some doofus she’s known for ten minutes. Nikki is fiercely independent and notoriously hard to pin down when it comes to anything personal. She is passionate, but compartmentalized. She believes wholeheartedly in separation of church and state, and getting around her defenses requires patience and an absolutely steady, absolutely indirect assault, and that’s that. 

Except that, apparently, is not that at all.

He can’t write Nikki right now. There’s a flutter of fear in his gut that he can’t write Nikki at all any more, but he ignores that. He shuts her up in a document, in a _Probably Junk_ folder. He moves to slam the lid of the laptop, but he’s heartsore. His mind keeps replaying the smile she gave him, all the more devastating because it was a little gawky. It keeps offering up the image of her hand in his, her reluctance to let go. It’s too much. Not writing at all is no more an option than writing Nikki right now.

He opens a fresh page and bangs out _**BENNY**_ in bold caps, centered at the top. He stumbles through a list of all the man’s malapropisms he can remember and tries to find the words for his hair and his mile-wide sideburns. He sketches out the details of his Disco Stu polyester jacket and its exact shade of filthy tan. He tries to describe the smell rolling off him—bar mix and cigarette smoke, thick as tail-pipe exhaust, and something greasy he’d have sworn was clown white.

He remembers the duffel bag with its prominent logo. He grumbles to himself about that. It’s such a boring item, though the logo has plot point potential. He tries to imagine a more interesting container—something befitting Benny and his wolf man hair—when he remembers the boa.

The boa stops him in his tracks. It’s a great detail—that coil of shocking pink where stacks of cash ought to be. It’s a perfect, chapter-ending reveal, but it bothers him. It ends the brief respite—the brief escape—writing has offered him tonight, and he doesn’t know why.

He doesn’t question, it though. He moves on. He has to. He quickly saves and closes _**BENNY**_ and opens another blank document. _Rebecca Strong_ finds its way to the top, centered, but no bold, no caps. It’s tentative, even though she interests him, too. The irony of her name juxtaposed to her utter collapse almost before they’d even started asking questions—that interests him, but there are these relentless, punishing fingers kneading at his insides. He gets as far as _cry talk, stupid duffel,_ and _blackmail times two._

It’s as far as he gets before he’s on his feet, trying to pace off his agitation, his strange, simmering anger, that’s what it is. He’s angry about Benny and his shocking pink boa. He’s angry about Rebecca and a second boring duffle bag thumping down on the work room table. He’s angry about Demming’s very existence, and in the mess of his mind, it’s all tied up together.

They’re unbelievable, that’s what it is. All three of them. Rebecca, a sobbing mess of a woman walks about with seventy-five thousand dollars in a bold blackmail scheme hatched because no one would listen. Benny the loser live gets to live out the best three days of his life with a second seventy-five thousand. Demming takes a direct approach that’s absolutely stupid in its simplicity, and he ends up kissing her right there in the precinct.

He can’t live with this cast of characters. He can’t believe the sheer nerve of them—taking action like it’s not the most unlikely thing in the world.

He can’t live with this. They’re not how the story is supposed to go.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Hmmm. This is the last one for a while. Traveling.


	24. Dead Air—A Deadly Game (2 x 24)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She won’t call the silence deafening. That would be hyperbole. It would be an oxymoron. It would be any number of the literary sins that are his purview. Were his purview.

She won’t call the silence deafening. That would be hyperbole. It would be an oxymoron. It would be any number of the literary sins that are his purview. Were his purview.

It’s _not_ deafening. It’s not even silence. It’s … some kind of lull, though. Something missing from her sonic backdrop that she can’t place at all, but its absence makes everything else too loud, too immediate, too pressing.

She thinks it’s the downstream silences at first. Ryan and Esposito are the opposite of subtle in this as in all things. They give his name wide berth. They turn the volume on their conversations way, way down when they’re tossing back and forth some joke he would have made—some joke he did make that they’ve repeated ad nauseam in the past. They mouth _Castle Zone_ not quite behind her back when they’ve decided that adolescent fantasy and wild speculation are the keys to cracking a particular case.

But it’s not their silence that’s amplifying the rest of the world. It’s not the contagious silences that drop like a stone in the break room, the elevator, the odd corners of the bullpen, because word has spread out from the two of them as they warn everyone that Richard Castle is persona non grata in this homicide squad.

It’s not Lanie’s brand of silence, either, though that has a decibel level all its own. They haven’t fought. The two of them are simultaneously too close and not close enough to ever really _fight_ , but they’d had a moment in the wake of Gina of the Rolling Suitcase, Gina of the Intended Summer on Top of Him. Lanie had come out of the impromptu workroom celebration—as only Lanie could have—with her fist cocked and her arms open. It had been too much. For Kate, it had been too much. It had been a moment, and now Lanie ostentatiously avoids the subject of him altogether. But it’s not that silence

It’s not the silence of her dad when he stops asking how her shadow is and what hideous crimes he’s committed lately, or the silence of the wordless workings of Montgomery’s jaw every time he catches her still at the board when he flips the lights off at night or on in the morning.

It’s not the silence of day after day without him. It’s not even her own silence.

That may be the weirdest thing about it. She expects it to be the fact that he’s not at her elbow, over her shoulder, trotting to catch up with her, talking, singing, whistling, tapping out rhythms on whatever surface is at hand, all the while. She _assumes_ that it’s the fact that her own word count per day has dropped dramatically by simple virtue of the fact that she doesn’t have to tell him to shut up a thousand times an hour. She’s sure it must really be that the two of them aren’t bickering absolutely constantly.

But that’s not the silence, either.

She gives up on figuring it out. She gets used to it, like a constant headache thundering within the sore, thick bones just behind each ear. She lives with it, and she won’t call it deafening or anything else. She won’t expend another second trying to figure it out.

She does figure it out though. Weeks on and completely by accident, the solution drops almost literally in her lap.

She’s out of candy for her desktop dish. She seems always to be out of candy these days, and she’s always sure there’s a bag she’s stashed away somewhere. There never is these days, but she’s always sure.

It’s the middle of the night and she’s tearing her desk apart. That’s almost literal, too. She starts with the left-hand drawers. She works from top to bottom, from shallow to deep. She hauls each drawer out to its full, clattering extension with an impatient yank. She brushes aside half-used legal pads and nearly exhausted stacks of index cards and post-its. She digs beneath brand new folders and folders she keeps meaning to re-purpose. She scrabbles along the scarred metal bottoms until there’s grit beneath every one of her fingernails.

She slams the last of the left-hand drawers with a resounding bang. It fills the silence for exactly one second. She moves on to the wide center tray, even though it’s not deep enough to hide anything she’s after. Still, she tugs with purpose. She tugs with enough force that she goes rolling backward in her chair and very nearly pulls the whole drawer off its track.

It tilts crazily downward. She can see the telescoping silver-in-silver rails bending under the sudden, unwelcome weight. She manages to jam her knees up into the drawer’s lip before the whole thing goes crashing to the floor, along with all its contents. She winces at the force of the contact. A premonition of the pair of bruises she’ll have flashes on the back of her eyelids.

She tries to shove the damned thing back in and meets resistance. The track is bent or a wheel’s dislodged somewhere in the bowels of the desk. She sighs and slides one hand underneath for support and sets to work emptying the thing with the other.

She pulls out her stapler, a ruler, and three pairs of scissors, at least two of which she’d snatched out of his hands as he idly clashed the blades in some kind of meditative state. She jostles the drawer with her knee and so many bottles of desiccated White Out roll to the front that she loses count as she drops them into the trash.

Wedged far in the back, interfering with the task at hand, is an ancient pink phone message pad with yellow carbonless copies beneath, and wedged under that, a Sherlock Holmes magnifying glass that, for the short while between Olivia Debiasse and the silence, had pride of place in her desktop pencil cup. She pauses over that. She twirls it by the stem between her fingers and watches the array of things on her blotter ripple in and out of focus. She eyes the metal trash can and decides it’s stupid. It would be stupid to throw it away. She sets the glass down in the midst of everything.

A dried-out glue stick topples and makes a break for sweet freedom as she hunches her shoulders. She reaches out with a blind hand to catch it as she peers into the dark, far recesses of the drawer. She can’t really see what’s bent or busted. She can’t really see anything. She lifts the wide tray firmly upward and tries again to brute force things back on track. That’s when she hears it—the rattle of a solitary object somewhere in that steel case gloom. 

Her searching fingers come up with it. She knows its shape and weight before before she can see it. She knows its provenance. It finds its way into her closed fist, though she’d rather leave it there, far back and in the dark.

It’s a short, thick bolt with a washer and hex nut twirled loosely on to its end. She uncurls her fingers slowly, one by one, though she hardly needs visual confirmation. She tips it from one hand to the other. The washer drags a glissando along the threads. It’s deafening. It’s the secret of the silence.

It’s from the chair that sits empty at the end of her desk, of course. It’s the lingering bit of the mummy’s curse, because she couldn’t quite remember where this one was supposed to go after that phase of the prank had played out. With the chair tipped legs upright, settled awkwardly between her knees, she hadn’t been able to find any obvious place for it, and when she’d tested her reconstruction with her own weight, she’d discovered the slightest bit of give in the legs so that all four never quite touched the ground at the same time. She’d discovered the squeak and decided that the least she owed him for a year and then some of adolescent fantasy and wild speculation—for everything—was the minor irritation of a slightly janky chair.

But he hadn’t noticed, or if he had, it’d been a feature not a bug—just that little bit of give in the legs and he’d elevated his fidgeting game. He’d rock it from foot to foot, back to front and on the diagonal. And with it had come the tap of metal glides on scuffed linoleum. With it had come the squeak, faint and not quite rhythmic, maddening at first, then simply part of the soundtrack of her late nights, her early mornings, and the dead, dark hours smack in between the two. Maddening at first, then simply reassuring.

It’s heavy, cupped in the palm of her hand. It’s metal-on-metal cool, but warming rapidly.

It’s a metaphor.

It’s the silence.

It’s deafening. _  
_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Awkward that this fell after my trip, not before, but that’s a wrap on Season 2. Hmmm.


End file.
